Rise
by AKA 24601
Summary: After his actions during a riot, Kenny finds himself doing some soul searching. After getting advice from the least likely of sources he finds himself firmer in his beliefs and opinions of right and wrong. And when rumours of conspiracy rise amid the crisis, Kenny starts taking action.
1. Riot

**Presenting my first chapter based thing which is probably going to turn out horribly. This is based during the Imaginationland trilogy for anyone keeping track. Incidentally this was to be written to go with some music but then after a terrible accident in which three people died that was abandoned. I'm not entirely happy with this first chapter but please do bear with it here.  
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**Review box at the bottom. Constructive stuff is nice but shit flinging, as ever, is welcome.**

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If Kenny had to describe something as the absolute visual representation of several quadrillion tonnes of shit heading fanwards, this would probably have to be it.

He was surrounded by just about the entire town freaking out and descending upon the shops in order to steal as much as they could get away with. Which considering that half of the local police force was involved in the rioting made it an effective all-you-can-eat buffet.

Kenny's financial situation being what it was, it would be missing an opportunity if he were not to join in. The first thing he'd stolen was a backpack. Then he'd set about filling it with decent food. It was difficult to do, sure, he had to keep up with the crowd so that the shops he hit actually had anything worth a damn, but keeping up with the crowd ran the risk of getting hit.

And since Kenny took an occasional beating, getting hit wasn't that great a problem. So he did keep up with the crowd and took whatever he could find. As long as it was essential, though. He hardly wanted to be considered a thief or anything.

Added upon the violence was screaming and shouting, a few people were firing guns into the air, a few more were setting things on fire. Such things happened when national disasters appeared to be impending. Normally in such a situation Kenny might be one of the four go-to fourth graders who would fix the problem, but on this occasion he was sitting it out.

He wasn't sitting it out because an assault on imagination was a bit too much for him - it was because Cartman was trying to get Kyle to suck his balls over some bullshit bet about a leprechaun and Kenny was having no part in it.

He heard a smash to his right - a new window had been smashed. He pushed his way through the crowd and climbed in. He stuffed his bag with what he could get - tinned stuff, mainly, since that was pretty much all his parents knew how to prepare. There were a few microwavable things in there too, and - inevitably - toaster waffles. With his bag full, he was all ready to leave, but fighting his way out was going to be fighting a one way flow - he withdrew to a far corner of the store, grabbing a chocolate bar on the way, and decided to sit down and wait for things to quiet down.

He ate slowly, savouring the taste. He didn't get to eat sweet stuff very often. When he was eventually done there were still people stealing everything they could, but they were filtering out too. He climbed out. There were fires everywhere now and a bit more fighting, though that was probably because a jewellery store had been busted into and they were scrabbling for the most valuable things. Kenny had no interest there. Unfortunately he did have to negotiate the crowd to get home, and wearing bright orange could put him across as an obvious target should someone feel like punching someone else or more police turn up with intent to stop the riots rather than join the party.

He ran across the street to a winter clothes store that hadn't seen as bad looting as some places and picked up a parka and trousers identical to his own orange ones, but in navy blue instead. Much better. He quickly changed into them and flung the orange stuff over his shoulder then braced himself for getting through the crowd again.

He stepped outside and at a brisk walk re entered the swarm. People paid little attention to him, which was good, in as much as their attending to smashing windows, stealing things and hitting each other could be considered good. He pulled his hood up and pulled the strings tight - that was much better. Warm and fuzzy inside, unrecognisable on the outside. Or it would have been if he didn't always wear parkas and people knew who he was.

He fought his way through without incident, and the crowd was thinning when he heard what sounded like a kindergartener yelping. He glanced to his left - someone Kenny recognised as Skeeter, a drunk from the bar who he was convinced was related to Craig's dad, appeared to be trying to steal a young boy's backpack.

That struck something with Kenny. The thing was, despite his previous actions that night, he did have a firm sense of right and wrong. He'd rationalised the stealing as "it's going to be stolen anyway, but our family needs it more than most people so I might as well take it." It was flimsy, he knew, but nobody was going to ask.

Weighing that up against mugging a five year old boy who was probably just in the worst possible place at an even worse time just for a backpack that was likely full of school stuff, there was a very clear line in the sand somewhere there. Skeeter was on the wrong side of the line, not even in the desert any more – fuck it, he was hiking around Arctic tundra punching polar bears in the face.

Kenny sighed, squared himself, tried not to think about how painful this could end up being if he fucked it up, and took a run towards Skeeter, jumped up and smashed the guy's face into the wall. Skeeter let out an _umph! _and flailed behind himself for a few seconds - Kenny promptly reacquainted his face with the wall again. And again. The fifth attempt did the trick. Skeeter collapsed. Panting a bit, Kenny returned the bag to the kid. "You alright?" he asked.

"Thanks!" he replied. Kenny recognised him now - he was Ike's friend Filmore.

"You want me to take you home?"

"Sure." Kenny picked Filmore up and took him towards his house. Kenny knew where it was - he'd had to wait for Kyle to pick Ike up from his house a few times. The plan was rather undercut, though, when the red and blue lights appeared at the end of the road. Kenny turned around - the crowd was hurrying in their direction, with flashes of blue and red behind them too.

"Oh..." Kenny pondered what to say at the arrival of actual competent police who didn't hold to the maxim of "if you can't beat them join them" then not even attempt to beat them. The word came to him naturally: "Fuck."

A voice came over a megaphone. "DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL USE FORCE." On top of that there was a line of riot police in front of the lights. Kenny had no intent of being batoned and pepper sprayed while there was a kindergartener in his care, but there wasn't any easy way out. He looked around, desperate to get away before the riot guys got to him.

There was a back alley on the left - that'd have to do. Kenny pulled Filmore onto his back, hoping he wouldn't crush the contents of his backpack too much. Two of the riot guys broke off at the sudden movement and charged them. That wouldn't have been so bad if the alley hadn't been a dead end. Kenny swore again.

There was a door. Kenny kicked it. Nothing. He kicked it again, but it only served to hurt his leg. He turned back to the end of the alley, but didn't want to risk anything. There was a large bin that looked like a good hiding place, but it reeked. Kenny instead did the idiotic thing and made for the drainpipe next to it. "Hold on," he warned Filmore - then he started climbing.

It started off well, but the trouble with carrying even the weight of one person, let alone two up a drainpipe was that unless one had some impressive upper body strength there was a decent chance you could fall off. Kenny was exerting himself far more than he should have, and it was taking all his concentration to not wear out.

What didn't help was the riot guys rounding the end of the alley and screaming "HALT!" Kenny didn't - instead, he panicked and let go of the pipe, fell back, bashed his legs on the side of the skip and fell into a nice big cushion of waste.

He pushed Filmore under, then dove under himself. He heard the cops talking.

"You going to fish them out of there?"

"Fuck, no! It's filthy in there!"

"Well I'm not doing it!" There was a few seconds of silence. "Ah, fuck them, they can stay in there, I don't care. Come on, let's beat some people up." Kenny heard them tramping away. He didn't have the strength left to climb out, though. Climbing up a drainpipe wasn't the best idea.

He heard Filmore speak. "Can we go home now?"

"Not just yet, Filmore..." Kenny said exhaustedly. "Can you wait a few minutes?"

"I want to go home!" Kenny predicted a tantrum coming along.

"Alright!" Kenny grabbed the edge of the skip and hauled himself up, glanced around, then fell back into the skip as his arms gave way. "Okay... Hold on to me again, would you?" Filmore did so and Kenny, kicking with his legs, hauled themselves over the edge of the skip, then fell onto the ground, panting.

"I... I've got to work on this," he panted into the floor. Filmore didn't hear him for the face of the stunned police officer who was taking a leak against the door that Kenny had failed to kick open.

"Kenny?"

"HEY!" That got Kenny moving again. He scrambled up and ran towards the end of the alley. He almost skidded on the way out, thanked whichever god had been having fun with him with the whole skip thing for growing the fuck up and moving the police away, and ran towards his house, closely followed by the police officer, screaming at them to stop. He ran through fear more than anything - not so much fear for himself, he could always force the cop to kill him. It was fear of getting Filmore into trouble.

More than that, his family weren't exactly unknown to the South Park police. He really didn't want to give them an excuse to put a surveillance van outside their house all day. Plus he had in the past done quite a few crimes, mostly during his shenanigans with Kyle, Stan and Cartman. He'd always tried to limit it to things that needed to be done because they were the right thing to do, but of course there was the occasional accidentally burning the school down too.

All the running was wearing Kenny out. He didn't have the sort of diet that allowed for extended periods of exertion – as much as not having enough food at all was a problem, it wasn't even the right kind of food for long distance running. He regenerated at a healthy enough weight but the fat to muscle ratio, while not in the same star system as Cartman, was a bit too high for this sort of thing. Add a twenty kilogram child and several more kilos of foodstuffs on his back and that could very easily make catching him about as easy as shooting fish in a barrel used for storing physically disabled fish and using a grenade launcher from a position directly above the barrel. Basically it would be a bit unfair.

They were passing over the bridge between the city centre and the outskirts where everyone lived. At the precise worst time, a cop car came from the other direction. The sirens blared and the lights started flashing the moment the driver saw the chase going on. Kenny panicked and skidded to a halt. He heard Filmore start crying.

"Oh, shit..." Kenny considered options. He could turn back, try to outrun the cop or otherwise lose him, then go to the next bridge about a half mile upriver. That didn't seem like the best idea, though - Kenny was almost completely spent and the officer, who unfortunately was not a sugar addict who couldn't run five metres before getting a ticket to a cruise on the SS Heart Attack, seemed ready for more running.

Alternatively he could keep going the way he was going, dodge the car and break for home. That was an even worse idea. The bridge was narrow enough that the cruiser could block them without too much manoeuvering and Kenny didn't want to do any more clambering, mostly because his arms still felt ready to drop off from the whole drainpipe thing.

Kenny turned again and looked at the river. His gaze locked there for a few seconds. Now,_ that_ was an idea. It would be cold, and Kenny wouldn't be able to swim too well after running with a child on his back, climbing with a child on his back, bashing his shins and generally being exhausted, but he suspected that his pursuers wouldn't be too eager to chase them into freezing water. It was a stupid idea, but of the stupid ideas he'd had in the last couple of seconds it was the least stupid. And Filmore's screaming was getting ever so slightly annoying.

It'd have to do. "Hold on," he warned. He felt Filmore's grip tighten. He took a glance either way - the car was speeding towards them and the cop on foot had his pepper spray out. That was enough - Kenny turned to the barrier of the bridge and took a deep breath, once again bracing himself.

Then he vaulted the barrier and they both fell into the river.


	2. Hell and High Water

**Thanks all for reading. I'll try to get updates up within a week but I will probably fail. Feel free to kill me if I do.**

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Kenny couldn't tell what was going on.

All he could do was flail around wildly, trying to pull himself back above the water's surface. It was difficult, partly due to exhaustion but mostly because, as he'd found out earlier, exercise was inadvisable when carrying around a five year old. The weight was making keeping his head above water difficult.

Also the water was fucking freezing. He could barely move without feeling like he was about to enter a state of cryogenic suspension. And that was the final problem - he was in water. He couldn't breathe in water. While that wasn't normally a problem, everything he'd gone through the trouble of stealing would be lost if he died this time. More importantly, that could be it for Filmore too.

With that thought to encourage him to try a bit harder, Kenny started kicking upwards and at a right angle to the current of the river.

Kenny was washed downriver quickly, so he concentrated on getting to one side rather than fighting the flow. It didn't take too long – he clambered out, then collapsed onto the ground. It was too much exercise for one night. Filmore was nudging him, pushing cold wet fabric into him. He'd hoped he could just fall asleep or something. Clearly no such luck.

"You lost your other coat." Kenny raised his head to see two splotches of orange still in the river, floating away.

"Ugh… I've got spares." He lay there for a few minutes then eventually summoned the strength to force himself up. "Come on…" The two of them walked away from the river and towards the houses, in which none of the town were sleeping. They were all getting beaten up and arrested by riot police back in the town centre.

Kenny stopped outside Filmore's place. "This is yours, right?" Filmore nodded. "Right, go on. Warm drink, hot bath. Don't freeze to death." Another nod, then he was gone. Kenny turned towards his house. After ten minute's shivering walk, he reached his place. He took a quick peek through all the windows – Karen was asleep, Kevin wasn't there, and he was certain he'd seen his parents out rioting. They hadn't seen him, though – that was the main thing. He let himself in quietly.

After putting the food away and leaving the backpack on his floor to let dry, Kenny climbed into the shower himself. A hot shower was out of the question – the water was going to be warm at best. But anything warmer than ice would be sufficient as far as he cared.

He turned the stream on. The water wasn't warm, but it wasn't cold either – it was sort of cool. It'd do. Feeling a bit more comfortable now, Kenny collapsed. His strength was depleted – he'd been barely able to get this far. Under the stream of water, he fell asleep.

It was barely two hours later when he woke up. Even with the water only at a cool temperature the hot water supply had been used up, and the water getting cold acted as a very sharp alarm clock. He sighed, forced his way into a standing position and turned the water off. He needed to eat something. And soon.

He pulled his still damp trousers back on and made for the kitchen. Karen was awake. She smiled and waved at him as he walked in. Kenny hugged her as he passed then went for a cupboard. He picked a box at random and put the contents into the microwave.

Karen spoke up. "Where'd you get that from?" she asked, referring to the meal. "And…new pants?"

Kenny sighed. "You know all the things that happened in town last night? I took advantage. We can't live on poptarts for ever."

Karen nodded. It wasn't the first time Kenny had been out thieving and she'd grown used to that, but she needed some clarification. "Yeah, but… Why did you need new pants? And why are they wet?"

Anyone else, Kenny wouldn't have felt he'd have to justify himself to, but Karen was a very special case. She was someone that Kenny didn't want to end up like her family. He thought even he wasn't good enough - whether out of desperation or not, he'd still been out stealing things and that was wrong to do.

"Well, they're wet because I fell in a river, and..." He trailed off. Having not had to justify himself before he hadn't realised precisely how shit the reasoning was.

The silence dragged on too long for Karen, who turned back to her breakfast and sighed. "You shouldn't do that, Kenny." Kenny may have been imagining it but behind the blank tone of voice that was usual of a second grader, she sounded disappointed. Kenny turned back to the microwave, which promptly dinged, his mood somewhat deflated in a sort of Hindenburg type of way.

He took his meal out of the oven and sat down at the table. There wasn't any more talking. That wasn't entirely unusual, Karen being a shy girl. But for Kenny it was a bit awkward. He ate quickly and retreated to his room, where he lay back on his bed and couldn't get any rest at all. It was just a bit too much.

Kenny thought long, Kenny thought hard. He'd had no doubt that when he'd been doing it, what he'd been doing had been the right thing to do. And Karen understood the thing about the food. They couldn't afford anything decent so Kenny occasionally stole things, or bummed things off his friends if that was an available option.

It was the new clothes he wasn't able to justify. He'd taken them on a split second decision as a way to avoid being targeted by drunkards or rozzers. The first part might not have been so bad, but the second part was directly trying to avoid answering for being a looter.

Somehow, Kenny thought that if he was looking in a mirror right then he might have had a little angel version of him sitting on his shoulder, glaring at him, his new trousers, and possibly the generous helping of men's special interest literature occupying the space under his bed. There would have been a devil too, if it weren't occupied with said literature.

Kenny attempted to fill in for devil-him. If he'd been taken in by the cops, even the awful South Park brand where the punishment for murder seemed to be a few hours in a cell and a smack on the arse, doubtless the food would have been confiscated. He wouldn't have gotten anything back home, and Karen would be stuck with nutritionally deficient toaster waffles for a while longer.

Even though what he'd been doing was illegal, he'd been doing it for the right reason. He had no doubt of that. And if that meant avoiding arrest in order to do what was right, then surely he could not be blamed for that.

So why did he blame himself?

He rolled off his bed, closed his door and started praying. It was a futile gesture really, he could just wait for the next disaster to happen to him and ask Satan personally, he was as good a source for advice on anything not pertaining to romance as anyone. But this was immediate.

_Hey, God. _Having saved Heaven from the hordes of Satan once, Kenny could afford some informality. The best part was Satan didn't even know it had been him who'd done the saving. _I'm having a problem. _Kenny went about wording this very carefully. _I know you're kind of big on the thou shalt not steal thing, but I did some stealing last night. It's not the first time, I know that, you know that. But. _Another pause.

_I've been rationalising these things way too much. I took some stuff I didn't have to and I didn't even realise what I'd done until Karen made me think about it a bit. And I was… _Kenny opened his eyes and sagged his shoulders. _Oh, what's the fucking point? You're a Buddhist, all you're going to do is wish me good karma or some shit like that. _Kenny's commitment to the praying agenda quickly disappeared and he resumed staring at his ceiling. School was closed what with the whole attack on imagination. There wasn't that much to do.

Kenny decided a walk was in order. Clear his head up a bit. He retrieved his new parka from the bathroom and, stopping only to inform Karen of where he was going, left the house and made his way towards town.

Things had certainly quieted down since the night before. The scene was chaotic to say the least. Windows were still smashed and a car remained overturned, but the place was desolate. Perfect - Kenny's little reverie wouldn't get interrupted.

He was discovering why cognitive dissonance was so difficult. Doing the right thing had become a lot harder. All the thinking wasn't helping either. What had started out as a simple case of trying to figure out right and wrong had hideously mutated into a questioning of whether doing the right thing and doing the lawful thing could in fact mean doing the same thing.

He walked around a corner and a minor sense of déjà vu hit him when he saw, for the second time in twenty four hours, a mugging going on. Once again, Kenny felt that something needed doing, and once again the stupidity detector in the back of his head sent him a warning that he ignored. He started running towards the altercation.

The problem was that this time, there wasn't a huge riot going on. The sound of shoes crunching in snow was fairly clear, and the mugger wasn't a complete moron. He also had a knife. Which meant that Kenny charged chest first into the sharp end of it.

There was a very loud crunch and Kenny froze. The mugger's eyes widened and he ran off - he clearly hadn't been planning on killing anyone, let alone a nine year old boy. That was the important thing, at least. Kenny got a brief look at the guy he saved before he blacked out.

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Kenny opened his eyes. It was hot, red, and crowded. There was fire everywhere, accompanied with a generous helping of lava. The sign saying "WELCOME TO HELL", then, gave his intelligence no credit.

Kenny knew the drill. Things were friendly enough down there so nobody minded his doing whatever he wanted. He headed to a friend's house.

Satan was normally at work but his son was usually in. Kenny let himself in. Damien would know he was coming. Sure enough, when he got in the front room Damien was sitting on the other side of a Risk board, all set up for play. Kenny gave the Antichrist a bit of a stare then sat down.

"If I win this time, you're not going to throw a fit, right?" he asked.

Damien smiled at him. It was not a nice smile. It was that one that said 'I am imagining you with a white hot poker up your arse and it is giving me an erection for all the wrong reasons'. "Well then," he replied, "you're not going to win, are you?"

They started playing. It was about an hour in when Kenny struck up conversation. "Damien, I need help."

"I know." Kenny had expected that. "You're having a moral meltdown and you want my opinion on it." Damien glanced up, indicating that Kenny should pick the defence dice up. "You really think I'm the best person to ask?"

Kenny shrugged, watching as his defence failed and Damien took part of Europe from him. "You're the only friend I've got round these parts."

"Friend?"

"Yes." As much as Damien sounded disgusted, he couldn't help a small spark of happiness that someone considered him a friend. Especially someone he'd very recently condemned to four thousand years slowly sinking into an acid fountain. "You know what this is about already, I take it." Damien nodded. "Well then…" Kenny sighed. "Is there another way to go?"

"Alright." Damien leaned backwards, looking at Kenny. "I can't help thinking you're caring too much about what other people think about you. Specifically your sister." He ignored the glare Kenny was sending him. "Normally I'd advocate the usual do whatever you like and all the usual self centred shit I spew at most people, but… As you consider me your friend, here's what you should do.

"Do what you think is right. You're in something of a unique position to do that even if it kills you without it being too inconvenient for you. And don't think too hard about whatever other people think. That includes family and the law." He glanced at the board. "Your turn."

"Damien," Kenny said, making something absolutely clear. "Are you saying that I should just keep stealing things?"

"If you think it's the right thing to do, you go ahead. It's not the only law you'll have broken to, uh, do the right thing." Damien put a little emphasis on those last few words, just to make his distaste clear. Kenny's open mouthed silence and confused look prompted him to continue. "You bashed a guy's head into a wall multiple times and gave him a minor concussion. Ring a bell?"

"When?" Kenny asked.

"The guy was attacking a kindergartener, if I recall correctly."

"That? Surely that was legal?"

Damien shook his head slowly, tutting. "No, Kenny, that was assault. I'm not saying it wasn't the right thing to do, or that if I were in your position I wouldn't have joined in the party and given the kid some nasty injuries, but you thought it was the right thing. You didn't even think twice about it."

Kenny was slack jawed now. "All that worrying about evading arrest over a couple of clothes and a few cans of food, and you were actually more likely going to get done for assault." He chuckled, again humourlessly and somewhat foreboding. "You really need to sort your priorities out. Now, go already. You're not getting out of here before I've won."

The game took hours to finish, and Kenny made sure to do a few stupid things. Acid fountains weren't fun. Damien, therefore, won, and Kenny woke up in his bed back on Earth, now a little more sure of himself than before.


	3. Working Out

**So if I've ever said a bad word to anyone about their update speed, I unreservedly take it back. If you want a hug or anything when you're having writer's block on a lousy deadline, I'm over here in the arse of the world. Free hugs if there's not a fart storm going on.  
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**Seriously, this whole updating thing is difficult. **

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Kenny's mind being a lot freer meant he could at least rest easier. He was certain Karen was still giving him some frosty looks, but she never admitted anything.

Ticking Damien's advice over had turned his attention away from fretting over things like clothes, and instead he thought about Filmore. And, of course, that other guy from yesterday who he hadn't had a chance to recognise before getting his ribcage busted inwards by some maniac with a knife.

Intervening had been the right thing to do, Kenny had no doubt of that. If he'd had any before, Damien had quashed it. He was busy trying to comprehend that it was actually illegal to do that. That just didn't make sense – if he saw someone in a tight spot, he thought he'd be expected to help, not leave them to it until the police were finished doing whatever it was they did when they weren't doing their job.

That made no sense at all.

Carrying Filmore away from probable arrest for being in the middle of a riot was probably not quite legal and fair enough, Kenny knew that. But not defending him from a huge drunk guy was just a bit off.

Kenny's back started protesting at the thought of carrying Filmore again, interrupting his contemplation. Two days and a new body later and it still ached. Kenny sat up. "I've got to work out more…" he said to himself, before pulling the navy parka on and heading out, mentally setting out some sort of exercise regimen.

It was night by now and being clad in navy meant he couldn't be seen too easily. There was a very sharp wind too, and Kenny's hood didn't leave his face very well protected. Maybe a balaclava wouldn't be too far out of the question, if he could get his hands on one. He almost stopped at Kyle's house, the first one he came to, but remembered before going up the path that he wasn't in at the moment. He was getting involved with that Imaginationland shit that was going on while trying to not suck Cartman's balls. "Ugh…" Kenny spat at the thought of that, then he walked on.

He got to the larger buildings in the centre of South Park and thought about what he could do to at least build up his endurance, if not actual strength. He looked around for a few seconds, shrugged, then started jogging.

The route he went on went past the winter clothes store he'd borrowed from, which still had a smashed window and nobody had bothered coming down to open it up. He went in there and took a ski mask off one of the racks then, after a second's thought, left a $20 note on the counter. It was over half the money he had to his name, but he wasn't about to go ahead and steal more things unnecessarily.

He resumed running for a few seconds then paused. He turned around and went back into the shop. There was an open door there, leading into the back of the store. Maybe it was just interest but Kenny went through. Somewhere in the back of his head, he thought he heard a certain Antichrist saying "That's a burglary now, Kenny boy." He ignored that.

Kenny started looking around, eventually climbing three flights of stairs, going through a door and finding himself on the roof of the building. The view of the town from there was fairly spectacular. In the distance, Kenny even thought he could see some flames licking the sides of Tom's Rhinoplasty, probably a follow up to the riots he'd been part of attempting to leech off the success of that first one.

He sat down on the edge of the building. He looked around a bit.

Kenny looked for a few minutes. Then he realised something. He could continue his jog up here without sacrificing the view. The buildings weren't that far apart and if he did fuck up then hey ho, he'd be fine the next day. He stood up and started running. Then he started sprinting.

He got to the edge of the building and jumped over the alleyway below, stumbled on landing, couldn't save himself and faceplanted into the roof. _Okay_, he thought, _let's not do that again._ Kenny sat up and went to wipe the blood off his face, but all he succeeded in doing was rubbing it into his new ski mask. He groaned.

He realised he wasn't going to be able to continue running up on top of buildings, due to limits on how far he could jump without falling on his arse and how far he could run on a single building before he got too dizzy. Moreover, he thought, jogging was cardio. Then he thought he should have realised that before and smacked himself in the face, then he yelped in pain because of the fresh injury on his face that he'd just smacked.

It was one thing to burn off fat, but that wasn't Kenny's problem. His problem was strength. He needed weights of some description and there was nothing handy. A glance around confirmed an old TV aerial on the next roof over, though. Kenny took another run up, jumped up and grabbed the edge of the higher roof. He hauled himself up and walked to the aerial.

It didn't look too old, at least. Kenny tested his weight on it - it hung over an alleyway with a drainpipe and skip Kenny was a bit too familiar with in it. Once he was hanging over the alley from four storeys up, he pulled on the aerial a bit. It creaked but held. Satisfied, Kenny pulled himself slowly up so that his head was over the bar, then back down again. It didn't half burn in his upper arms, but he carried on doing it.

Being in the all too familiar location sent Kenny's mind back to that problem he'd been dealing with. How the hell could it be illegal to help someone who needs the help badly and quickly, but to do so would mean a few laws might need to be bumped down the priorities list?

_Up. Down. Up. Down. _

Kenny mulled it over. Thinking about it was tough to do but it stopped him noticing his arms burning with effort. What made it so difficult was the conclusion that the line of thought led to. _Up. _That maybe, just maybe, the law needed breaking once in a while. _Down._ But then in South Park, the police weren't precisely top notch. _Up._

And all that meant was that if laws were to be broken, they'd have to be broken a lot. _Down. _Was that a good thing? Far from it. _Up._

Kenny's teeth grit at the thought of it. People couldn't put trust into a mob. Mobs, as Kenny had witnessed firsthand, misbehaved. Even himself, normally he always at least _tried _to do the right thing. And yet then he had stolen clothes he had no need of. _Fuck._

The epiphany that may have hit then was promptly interrupted by the snap of the aerial. Kenny panicked for the second it took for him to fall. Then he heard a crunch as his spine broke on the edge of the skip. Once again, _Fuck._

Kenny died. Again.

The next few days were strange as far as Kenny's schedule went. With the town deserted due to the crisis that was apparently at hand but showed no sign if worsening, Kenny had lots of room and time to work out. He'd worked out a three-time daily routine involving all the usual stuff for fat burning and muscle building, even if he had to improvise in places. What's more he'd found a newer aerial that wouldn't break the moment he put ever so slightly more than his body weight on it, so pull ups were back in.

It hurt doing so, and Kenny spent his nights lying awake and aching. If he broke his body completely that wasn't going to be a great problem since he could acquaint his head with a bullet and regenerate the next day.

Kenny was loading down his backpack with whatever he could find when Karen walked into his room. He glanced at her. "Hey."

"Kenny, where are you going?"

"Just for a walk." Kenny was trying to keep Karen in the dark about working out a bit more than he normally did.

"Same as last night?" Kenny nodded. "And the night before?" Kenny sighed, then nodded again. Karen looked down at the carpet for a second. "Why?"

Kenny couldn't lie to Karen so a path of selective honesty seemed the obvious choice. "Because," he said, standing up and bending down to eye level with his sister, "your brother is getting chubby." She smiled a bit at that. Kenny sensed it was working. "You don't want me to end up like Cartman, do you?"

Karen shook her head, still smiling. She didn't speak though - she was shy like that.

"Well then," Kenny continued, "Kenny's got to work out. But if you want me to stay, I'll stay."

Karen shook her head. "No, you go. I was just wondering." She retreated to her room. Kenny smiled sadly after her. He briefly considered not going out and spending the night with Karen, but quickly decided against. Of course, the thing about _selective _honesty was that it wasn't _entire_ honesty. He wasn't about to divulge the specifics on strength training he'd been getting into.

He left the house, avoiding the kitchen where his parents were having a minor domestic and Kevin was joining in the fun. They'd been in jail for rioting, and since the South Park police force was, in the kindest words Kenny deigned to use, shit, they'd been let out after less than a week. Since they couldn't very well fight each other in a prison, they had a lot of pent up anger to vent. Kenny wanted nothing to do with that.

He went outside. Again, the place was deserted. Kenny pulled on the ski mask and started running.

Kenny was certain now. While things weren't _bad _in South Park, they weren't good. The police were incompetent and there were a few people whose family brain cell was evolved sufficiently enough that they could hold a single thought for longer than twelve picoseconds that had realised this and took a bit of advantage.

So it wasn't out of the question that someone could do something about it. Kenny was in a good position to be that someone too - he'd tried death and it had never quite taken. It was no obstacle.

But moreover, it was the right thing to do, and that was what mattered.

With that thought safely embedded in his mind, he ran towards the town centre.

With his intense training he'd gotten used - very quickly - to carrying on when his body was screaming at him to stop. He'd burned off fat and was getting stronger. It wasn't particularly fast going but the effect was there.

He got to his fire escape and started climbing upwards. He ran across the roofs, making the jumps this time as he'd had practice. He got to his aerial and jumped down onto it, grabbing onto it. He knew it could take his weight now.

He started counting to a hundred as he pulled himself up and down. At forty seven, though, he was interrupted by a scream from street level. He edged along the aerial to the roof and walked to the far edge of the roof. A look down confirmed something going on down there.

From the top of the building, he could see the usual suspects - a gun, a small wad of money, a balaclava and a terrified expression.

It had been over half a week now. Kenny thought he was ready. He grinned behind his hood and ski mask then stood at full height, dumping the bag a few feet from the edge.

Kenny stared out at the night for a few seconds. Then back down. He waited. The masked person stepped back from their victim. That was the time he'd been waiting for - Kenny jumped. He brought his knees up to his chest and flipped in mid air. Then he fell down, straightening out. He carried on spinning.

That was the first inkling that he got that things were going wrong. When he saw he wasn't going to be landing on his target at all, he panicked. Then his face crunched into the street. He flopped face down onto the ground and stayed still.

He felt blood running between his face and the ski mask. He felt two pairs of eyes staring at him in bemused disbelief.

His neck hurt - it felt broken. Nonetheless, he found himself able to turn his head slowly so he was facing the side. He could see the robber guy, who looked as if a UFO had just landed on his car.

Kenny stared for three seconds, then said "Kill me." He saw the gun get pointed at him and then he was sitting up in a familiar room with a familiar black haired boy sitting in front of a chess board.

Damien grinned at him in that unsettling way of his. "White to move, Kenny boy."


	4. Families, Friends and Soldiers

Kenny's alarm went off. _Still Alive _from Portal. How incredibly apt. He reached out and hit the Snooze button on his phone, then rolled back over. He could hear his parents at each others' throats on the far side of the house. He was staying out of it.

So he didn't get out of bed. After nine minutes the phone started singing again and Kenny shut it up. He scuttled up to sit on his pillow and think about exactly what had happened. It had been pretty simple - he'd fallen far too quickly and broken his face on the ground. He started setting rules for himself.

Firstly, no more flips until he could actually do the damn things. Secondly, he was going to have to find a way of arresting momentum somehow during falling - if he was unlucky enough to be caught in that situation again, he didn't want to have to waste ten minutes looking for a fire escape only to find his target gone and someone else in a puddle of blood.

_Christ _he thought, _when the fuck did doing what's right become so fucking difficult? _

He got up and pulled on his orange stuff, leaving aside the navy clothes. He headed to his closet and looked through his stuff, but found nothing that would do the job. Kenny groaned and turned around. His bedclothes caught his eye.

Specifically, a blanket under his bed, a heavy old black thing that came in useful on cold nights. But he'd grown used to being cold and he had multiple spare parkas. He pulled it out and looked at it. It was heavy and dark - those were pretty much the conditions.

Kenny grinned and pulled out his old sewing kit from his home economics period.

The result, despite his initial enthusiasm, wasn't so great. Kenny looked at it distastefully - he'd put a neck hole far too far back and because of that the fabric was rolled up a lot around the front, which wasn't especially comfortable. Kenny sighed and went to the kitchen for breakfast.

He shrewdly dodged a flying beer bottle as it missed his father. "YOU'RE A DRUNK PIECE OF SHIT, STUART! YOU FUCKING GOT US DONE!" Ah, they were still fighting over ending up in jail. Kenny stayed out of it. He put frozen poptarts into the toaster and waited.

"YOU WERE DRUNK TOO, BITCH!" That was his masterstroke comeback. Kenny payed no heed.

"YOU'RE THE ONE WHO PEED ALL OVER A COP!" Kenny held back the laugh as another crash came. "WE HAD TO SIT IN A FUCKING HOLDING CELL FOR THREE DAYS!" Crash! "NOTHING TO DRINK, NOTHING TO SMOKE!" Kenny heard a punch get thrown. He threw a _Eh, what can we do? _glance at Karen, who threw one right back.

The toaster spat breakfast out. "AND THERE WAS NO FUCKING TV SO THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO EXCEPT LISTEN TO BULLSHIT RUMOURS!" Kenny sat down across from his sister.

"HEY, THEY AREN'T BULLSHIT! I-"

Carol had run out of bottles by now so started throwing the crockery. "ANYTHING STARTED BY ALEX FUCKING JONES IS BULLSHIT! I… GAH!" She banged her hands down on the table, rattling Kenny's plate. That generally meant she wanted attention - Kenny looked up.

"Kenny, explain something to your father. The dumb bastard-"

"I'm not a dumb bastard!"

"The dumb bastard," Carol repeated, slurring it out a bit more, which in the thick redneckish drawl was especially effective, "is buying into this dumb idea that the army's going to take over."

Kenny had heard that one before several thousand times. It hadn't happened yet, so he wasn't convinced.

"Tell him why that's not going to happen," his mother ordered. Since his father had taken several litres of booze to the liver and many breakable things to the face, Kenny figured the best option was to side with his currently much more valid mother. He turned to Stuart.

"Dad," he said, "the army will not take over. If they can't invade a Middle East country that aren't expecting it, they aren't going to be able to take over the US if we are."

"Shut up, son!" Stuart yelled, pulling a shard of plate out of his cheek. "It's true, Jimbo said so!" Kenny was all too ready to dismiss that out of hand. "So'd Tommy, and- OW!" That was the plate Kenny had just finished eating off hitting Stuart in the face. It was just as well Kenny had perked up a bit.

Jimbo Kern believing shit like that was one thing, but Thomas Tucker, Craig's dad, was a bit different. Kenny got on with Craig, he knew Thomas as well as he could know someone whose primary method of communication was to flip the bird. That was worth investigating. Kenny stood up and ushered Karen away before things got any more dramatic.

Once she was safely in her room he changed into navy, grabbed his repurposed blanket and climbed out the window, faceplanting gracelessly into the snow.

He started towards town, pulling the blanket over his head. The way it had turned out was sort of like a cloak that he could wrap around himself, but had a slightly curved bottom. That way surface area was maximised during falls. It wouldn't save him from a great height but for short falls, maybe up to five or so floors, he was willing to try.

One problem was he needed to stop the back from flapping about instead of generating the drag it was there to generate, for which reason he'd keep the middle part of the material pressed between his shoes. It would look ridiculous, and it would necessitate swan diving, but it should work.

The plan for the day was simple. Get up on roofs, work out for a while. Double shift it, being as he had promised Karen he'd tell her stories later. Then on the way back, swing by Craig's and chat with his dad. Go back home, avoid parents, tell stories.

So far so good then. He began running towards town. He was getting faster and stronger. Slowly, sure, but he was making progress. Which, being the entire point of the exercise regimen, was convincing Kenny to continue to follow it.

It was a good three hours before he found himself out of breath, lying on a rooftop, red in the face and sweating into his clothes. He lay there for a few minutes just to get his breath back, then went over a few rooftops to where he knew all too well there was a skip in an alleyway. He took hold of the edges of the blanket arrangement and trapped the back between his heels, then held his arms out. That stretched out the material. Then he swan dived into the open skip.

He sank down into the reeking contents quite a bit, but the impact was a lot slower than it would have been. Though Kenny suspected it had looked ridiculous, the important thing was that it seemed to work. He smiled to himself then made for Craig's place. He removed the silly cloak-blanket thing when he got to the door and then knocked.

Craig answered, still in his pyjamas. Kenny couldn't blame him - school was out, they should all really have been sleeping in. "What do you want?" he asked in absolute monotone.

"Can I talk to your dad?"

There was a very long pause. "What?"

"Your-"

"Terrorists are literally attacking imagination. Your friends have disappeared some place. And you want to talk to my asshole dad."

"Yes."

Craig stared blankly for a moment, then stepped aside. Kenny entered, registering the middle finger that was being sent his way by Craig but not acknowledging it.

Kenny headed through to the kitchen, where Thomas Tucker was doing something on his laptop. Kenny noted he looked a bit disheveled - to be expected from someone who'd apparently recently spent a few days in a holding cell. There was a noticable smell, like he hadn't gotten around to showering yet - and even by Kenny's impoverished standards, that was just sickening.

Thomas glanced up. Recognising Kenny's face, he promptly flipped him off, which coming from a guy whose hair was as messy as Kenny's but wasn't usually was actually rather amusing. "Mr. Tucker, I need to ask you something."

"What is it?"

Kenny thought about how to ask. "My dad says you think something about some kind of-"

"What, the army thing? Yeah, what about it?"

Kenny had no idea how Thomas had guessed. "Well… What exactly the fuck is it?"

Thomas rubbed his forehead with exhaustion and talked. "Well, it's just a rumour. But it's something like an army base out of town, the guys there are gearing up for something big, only Skeeter, my brother, he says they've got nothing planned or anything. No deployments. Seems suspicious. But it's just rumours, you know?"

Kenny ticked that over, trying not to feel too guilty about chatting to the brother of someone who he'd slightly concussed. "Dad says you believe it."

"I guess I did for a while but it's been a few days, nothing's happened. I guess it was just, like, weird circumstances or something. Sort of stuff that dipshit of a father of yours - no offence - would believe, even after military service."

Kenny nodded. "None taken. I'd trade him in any day."

Thomas nodded. He paused for a second. "What's with that blanket?" he asked.

Kenny didn't hesitate. "Dry cleaning."

"Oh."

Kenny left after that, getting flipped off by Craig on the way out, as per. His initial worries of any kind of military takeover were subdued now - just a misunderstanding between a rumour and a gullible person.

Which, naturally, meant it came as rather a surprise when it happened.

* * *

It had been a few days since that conversation when weird things started happening. Out on his exercise routine, which Kenny had modified to include some freerunning practice, something he had turned out to have talent for, Kenny had stopped when he saw three soldiers idling down the street.

That in itself was not entirely unusual, in uniform soldiers were an occasional sight. It was the way they were armed and were walking more purposefully than normal. The jeep that then passed by didn't really help things. Kenny swore to himself and walked up to them.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"Go to the town hall," the lead soldier said in a very bored voice. "All will be explained over there." Kenny noted a hint of monotony in the voice, that reminded him a bit of Craig except higher in pitch. It freaked him out, and how they just walked on afterwards. Kenny wrote it off as having to repeat the same thing to everyone, though, and started jogging towards the town hall.

Sure enough, there was a small gathering there. A guy was up on a podium speaking, with Mayor McDaniels sitting behind him looking extremely pissed off.

"…so in light of the current crisis, the military is reinforcing the police in towns and cities across America as a precaution. That way, in the event this crisis does escalate, the population will have nothing to worry about."

That seemed fair enough. But Kenny thought that maybe he was being a bit naïve on that front - certainly the mob of townpeople in front of the guy's podium wasn't buying the story. They were being civil enough, but that might have been to do with the line of soldiers between them and the podium rather than actual will to behave themselves.

"As a result of this," the guy said - Kenny thought he saw a colonel's rank patch (Oak leaf was colonel, right? Or was that the bird?) on the guy's uniform, but he couldn't be sure both from the distance and his knowledge of rank patches coming from first person military shooters that he didn't really enjoy playing all that much anyway, partly because after his experience of death he didn't like the thought of gunning down hordes of technologically inferior enemies, but mostly because he was a just a little bit jealous of people who could afford games like that in the first place. In short: Fuck if Kenny knew. "I expect you to respect my men like you'd respect any other cop."

Kenny chuckled at the thought of Barbrady getting any respect. "By and large your day to day lives will be the same." Somehow, Kenny detected a _With a small but manageable increase in oppression_ in the subtext of that sentence. He ousted that thought from his head, though. He put it down to the redneck in him just being mistrustful of anyone with any kind of official authority. And if there was one thing Kenny never wanted to be, it was a redneck.

Kenny was about to turn around and write it off as some kind of standard procedure when the next sentence caught his ear and latched him in place like a very inappropriately placed padlock attached to a door that had just been violently slammed, stopping him from turning around. "As part of this, the town will be fortified to protect you in the event of an attack by the imagination creatures."

There was a very loud groan, and Kenny saw a beer can fly from somewhere in the crowd to the colonel or whatever's face. He grunted. "Right! Who threw that?" Silence. "Come on, who threw that?" A sheepish hand went up. The speaker picked up the can and threw it right back - it burst on the guy's face and spattered beer over him and the surrounding five people.

Silence. Again. Then… Kenny had never known how a laugh could be described as "uproarious" but he got a pretty good impression from the crowd. Apparently a throw like that could win a crowd of rednecks over.

Still, Kenny wasn't convinced. He'd been a bit turned off this idea by fortification. That seemed like a bit of a waste of resources. Fortification of every town in America would be a drain, wouldn't it? What about the state guards, the National Guard?

But then, Kenny didn't understand politics. With that thought in mind, he decided that the best course of action might be to just roll with it for now.

Which didn't mean he wouldn't be keeping an eye on these guys. He wasn't sure.


	5. The Wall

**Shitty alert, shitty alert. Partly I had to deal with a nasty case of the block here and hence the week plus wait, for anyone who still gives a damn. I'm going to try to update it by Sundays from now on. (That's_ next_ Sunday by the way, nobody can do it that fast)**

* * *

Kenny had to give that army man - who had turned out to be a lieutenant colonel called Greg - some credit. Day to day life wasn't actually that different with the light infantry in town. Greg's stunt at the town square had bought him some popularity with the redneck population, so the vicious rumours had died down overnight. Kenny's exercise routine was undisrupted aside from the newest modification he'd made to pass by any rumoured military hot spots.

All in all, he was pretty much convinced.

He was up on a roof, taking stock. He could see a wall being built around the town as part of the fortifications. Kenny thought that was excessive but if, as Greg had explained, the crisis did escalate, then Kenny would sure as hell feel more comfortable with a wall rather than a barbed wire fence.

He did a little shrug and resumed his exercising. It really was working.

When he got home, things were pretty quiet. Stuart was passed out on the couch, catatonic and in what appeared to be a very uncomfortable position. Kenny made a sort of "ugh" sound and moved on to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of water. Carol was sat at the table, doing her best to sew a hole in one of Kevin's shirts shut. "Again?" he asked in monotone.

She knew exactly what he was talking about. Stuart always drank himself silly when he had marginally bad news, and on one occasion had ended up having a photo taken of him with a banana lodged between his buttocks for some reason. "Yeah," she groaned.

"Why?"

"The wall going round the town, looks like it's going to be cutting off the roads. That means no booze is coming in any time soon. Plenty enough to last, of course, but that bastard thought it'd be best to drink as much as possible right now."

Kenny shook his head in disbelief. "Idiot."

"Yeah." She was threading a little more angrily now. "I decided to sober up for a while, and he decided to do the exact fucking opposite."

"Huh." Finishing his water, Kenny put his cup away and walked towards his room. Halfway down the hall he froze as something else slightly hit him. Then he walked backwards, back into the kitchen, wheeled around to the right and faced his mother again. "What do you mean they're cutting off the roads?"

"Wouldn't be a very good fortification if there's big fucking holes every time a road passes through now, would it?" Carol cut the thread with a knife that would be used for cooking if they could afford things that needed chopping and began tying it.

Kenny was silent. "Can't they build gates or something?"

"Well, clearly not. They would if they could, you dumbass." Kenny let that slide. A gate was easy enough to make. Even one slab of whatever they were making the wall out of that could be lifted out of the way. And instead, apparently, the town was being completely walled off.

That was both worrying and a bit suspicious. Kenny made a note to swing by Greg's place at some point. He went to his room and dived onto his bed intending to nap for an hour or two before going back out.

He ended up sleeping for not quite that long, after Kevin started throwing up loudly on the other side of the bedroom wall, apparently having violent withdrawal from whatever it was he'd been taking and had run out of. Kenny groaned and turned on his radio.

After some tuning he picked up some heavy swing music, which a bang on the wall prompted him to turn down a bit. He lay there, couldn't fall back asleep, and so got right back up. He turned off his shitty radio and forced his way up.

As long as he wasn't going to be getting any sleep, and as long as Karen didn't need any attention (and a glance into her room confirmed that she'd been able to sleep through Kevin's throwing up) Kenny thought he might as well go and ask Lieutenant Colonel Greg - a name and rank combination that Kenny found inexplicably funny - what exactly was going on with the town wall project.

He left the house - opting to not take the blanket cape arrangement with him this time. He'd found out that it didn't really help when landing on concrete or asphalt. Instead he wanted to try changing the way he landed. He'd seen something about how parachutists landing - by rolling over - reducing shock to the legs, which would keep him from horribly embarrassing himself again.

He decided to stop off at Greg's little camp first. There were tents out, being as certain third amendments had meant that a lot of mistrustful people had refused to let them stay over, and if the troops didn't like it they could shove it.

Greg, meanwhile, had landed a prime spot in the city hall. Kenny found him outside, though. It was his first proper look at the guy. Short brown hair, maybe five eleven tall, blue eyes and a ridiculous goatee beard that made him look like a disaffected member of Generation X.

He saw Kenny coming. "Let me guess," he droned in a bored voice that Kenny suspected even Craig would have to have a level of appreciation for. "You want to know why the wall's isolating the town completely?"

"Well….Yeah."

Greg sighed and did that thing Stan did sometimes with the bridge of his nose. Kenny couldn't help but wonder at that point how him and the other guys were doing. Last he'd heard there was a motion going through the government to bomb Imaginationland - and wasn't that typical? With the threat of somewhere being bombed, America gets in and bombs it first.

"Well, you know what the problem is with a wall with a hole in it?"

Kenny knew the answer to that one, his mother had gone through it with him. "That there is a hole in it?"

Greg smiled in the most infuriatingly condescending way Kenny had ever seen. "You're going to go far, you know."

Kenny shrugged. "So can't you just bolt a gate from this side or something?"

"Don't be silly." Well, that wasn't the most reassuring answer. It was a viable solution to the problem, dismissed out of hand without consideration. Kenny wouldn't admit it out loud but maybe the redneck population had been right to be mistrustful.

Oh, come on, he was nine. He had an excuse for a bit of naivety. He was recognising that it might not be worth his time pursuing further conversation so he went off to find a nice short building somewhere.

Negotiating his way through the town, through the people who felt more secure with the military presence and more willing to leave their houses and through the military presence itself, Kenny climbed up his fire escape and found a shorter building, only two storeys, with a snow drift on the ground next to it. He ran up, jumped, and crumpled on the ground, rolling in the snow drift.

It still hurt, but he was still functional. That seemed worth it. Maybe the parachute cloak blanket thing could slow him down so that it didn't hurt. Why he hadn't thought of that earlier he didn't know. It was a work in progress, on the cutting edge of innovation a few hiccups were to be expected.

Especially when the innovator was a redneck kid often addressed as "you little shit" or something similar.

Kenny went back up the building and tried it a few more times, trying different ways of rolling on landing to see what the best way of landing from a height and not hurting himself too badly was. He eventually decided that it was to land on the feet, crumple the legs, roll onto the right shoulder and get up when convenient.

A bit of practice, he reasoned, might even be able to get him to be able to seamlessly jump, roll and keep on running without slowing down much at all.

Kenny headed for home. His dad was in the exact same position on the sofa as he'd been before, still catatonic. He went to his room intending to listen to some radio then sleep. Plans that were very thoroughly hashed when he turned the radio on and picked nothing up.

That in itself was not unusual. Kenny's radio was shit. It was a good day if he could pick up a single station after only hitting the set once. So he hit the set and tried again. Still nothing.

So much for his bed. He got up and went back into the lounge, which was essentially uninhabited being as his dad was still catatonic in the armchair, though he was up to the stage where he was managing low zombielike groans and wasn't drooling all over his shirt any more. Kenny kicked Stuart in the leg, only to elicit a slightly more pained groan than the rest of them.

Kenny therefore didn't hesitate to pry the remote control for the TV from between Stuart's leg and the arm of the chair. If he couldn't listen to radio, there was always NASCAR to fall back on. Or Terrence and Phillip.

Kenny flipped the TV on and started flicking through channels. There wasn't anything of any interest on - bad comedy, Honey Mother Fucking Boo Boo, more bad comedy, some ridiculous disaster movie of the genre pioneered by Syfy in which two random animals got mashed together and made dangerous.

There being nothing else on, though, Kenny settled for that.

He promptly fell asleep watching it, so was startled awake when white noise suddenly blared from the set. He threw the remote at it, which normally did the trick - the TV aerial was kind of shit too. It didn't do the trick, though.

Kenny got up and moved the aerial around a bit, which always worked eventually. Not this time though.

"Kenny!" came a shout - his mother. Kenny went through to the kitchen. "Damn radio's bust again."

"TV too," Kenny commented. The conversation may have progressed were it not for a knock at the door. Kenny volunteered to get it - when he opened the door he saw that Craig Tucker was gracing him with his presence. "Craig, what the hell are you doing here?"

"My TV's not picking up any signal," Craig droned.

Kenny grinned. "And I'm the first guy you came to? That's cute."

Craig held the blank stare. "I've tried Tweek, Token and Clyde, but none of them were in."

Kenny felt a bit disappointed at that. "Aww. Well, mine's not working either. Sorry, dude."

"Oh." Craig stared at the floor for a few seconds. "I guess I have some Red Racer DVDs I could watch."

Kenny shrugged, and was about to close the door when he asked "Do you think TV's out for the entire town?"

It was Craig's turn to shrug. "Why would it be?"

"Only I can see Randy Marsh charging from door to door in nought but his briefs looking ready to explode." Craig followed Kenny's line of sight to Stan's dad, who was doing as Kenny reported. "That's the kind of thing he'd do. And my radio's not working either."

Craig wasn't listening - he was staring at Randy, mouth open in borderline shock. As the disaster waiting to happen got closer, Craig turned to Kenny with a rare glimmer of urgency in his face. "Let me in." Kenny, fully understanding, did so. Then he slammed the door and, lacking a lock or bolt to secure the door, Kenny got behind the armchair his own father was busy being drunkenly passed out on and, with his back to the chair, pushed it against the door.

He found it a lot easier than he'd expected. Craig was staring with one eyebrow raised. "Have you been working out?" he asked in a manner that, had it come from anyone other than Craig, would have been insulting. Kenny nodded and, in front of the door with the sound of the spazzing out man worryingly close, rotated the armchair around so that it was side on to the door, then pushed it against the door just as it thumped.

Between them, Craig and Kenny couldn't make much out of Randy's incoherent babbling. Craig caught both "Stuart" and "Stan's friend" in there - and thank god Stuart was still unable to respond or even process any incoming sound - while Kenny caught "TV". The rest of it was entirely incomprehensible, not to mention masked by the incessant pounding on the door.

After a few minutes of awkward what would have been silence if not for the rabid man at the door, Kenny turned to Craig. "I've got some old Terrence and Phillip videos. Close enough?"

"Can your television drown that out?" Craig inquired, referring to Randy who was now begging at the door, though with no decrease in volume.

"Um…" Kenny thought about it. "Yes?"

"Get them out."

Kenny did so. As he picked them out - old video cassettes that he had gotten cheap because nobody used them any more - he made a note to once again go to Lieutenant Colonel Greg, a name Kenny still thought was unbecoming of the rank, to ask about the signal. If he had the same amount of luck as he'd had earlier…

Well, then, he decided that he'd have to find out himself. Even he did get shot to death forty seven trillion times in the process - he really, really did smell something very fishy about what was going on. He could also see said fish rotting on a wire in front of his face with the stench being fanned into his face through a jet engine.

It seemed the right thing to do, after all.


	6. Vents

**Well...it's Sunday somewhere anyway. I've been in London for three days, frankly I think two hours late is a good thing. Though against the London Underground, two hours late is frankly a blessing. Yes, Britain continues to be a shithole.  
**

* * *

Craig ended up sneaking out of Kenny's bedroom window, being as Randy had ended up having - or, Kenny suspected, thinking he was having in that overly dramatic and stupid way of his - a seizure on their doorstep. Once Craig was gone, Kenny swapped clothes so that he was in navy and also left.

He got to the centre of town quickly, jogging as usual, and got to the camp in the square. He noted security appeared to have been stepped up some for no apparent reason. He went up to a random grunt and asked "Where's Greg?"

"The lieutenant colonel is in the city hall right now," came the reply. Kenny nodded and started walking that way, but then it was followed up with "You can't go in there, though. Access to civilians is restricted."

"….oh." Kenny promptly turned around and left, fully intending to come back later.

One trip back to his house later he had his ski mask on and the blanket arrangement under his arm - what he was planning on doing was terminally stupid and he fully expected to have to do a runner at some point in the imminent future.

Men in the town could be reasonably relied upon to be morons so slipping through the camp was easy, especially with Kenny knowing a few rooftop shortcuts. He reached the edge of the square and started making his way, staying very much out of sight, to as close to the city hall as was possible. Then, after making absolutely sure nobody was watching, he jumped.

Using a combination of the blanket-parachute arrangement thing, which Kenny seriously had to decide what it was to stop himself having to call it such ridiculous things, and the rolling landing he'd been practicing Kenny made the three storey jump onto the ground without sustaining much injury. That left him between the guards at the back of the city hall and the building itself.

_Easy money._ Kenny selected the window that had been left conspicuously open as his entry point and clambered into the building.

The room was empty. That is, empty of people. Were there people in there, they'd probably be sat around the conference table and be discussing such menial matters as how to spend the money the town didn't have. Anyway, they weren't there now. That was always a good thing. What attracted Kenny's attention was the comically large ventilation duct attached to the ceiling. Not large enough for an adult to crawl through, naturally, but large enough that Kenny could force his way through. Probably.

He climbed up onto the table and then onto the duct. He had to kick the grating a few times to force it open, then he slid in.

It was far from comfortable. Duct systems being what they were, there was a slightly too warm wind coming from somewhere and heading out of the building. That was before the matter of him having to shuffle down diagonally for him to be able to fit in his parka.

Kenny considered that for a second, then backed up to the opening again. He pulled off the excess clothing, leaving him in the balaclava, and his shirt. The parka and blanket thing would have to stay behind. At least now he wouldn't dislocate one or both of all his joints doing… What was it he was doing?

The bit of doubt that had started niggling at him swiftly fled when he heard the faint echoes of people talking conveniently on the other side of the building. Kenny started following the noise - very uncomfortably, but as quietly as he could manage.

As quietly as he could manage seemed quiet enough. After a full half hour forcing his way through an air vent system that much like the one way system in Bristol city centre was clearly not designed to have a second job as a viable and efficient transport route, as demonstrated by his getting lost four times, taking three wrong turns, and on one occasion finding himself right back where he started, at which point he left a fist shaped dent in the side of the vent, after which Kenny had found himself asking how shoddy workmanship principles must have been to build anything out of something that could be so badly destroyed by a nine year old boy throwing a punch from an approximate distance of three inches and wondering if he should bring it up with Mayor McDaniels as soon as he could and she'd be back in the position to pretend to listen… Well, after all of that, Kenny found himself in the right place and with sore knuckles.

He was above another fucking conference room in which walked Lieutenant Colonel Greg - and Kenny was still not over that combination of rank and name, and hoped that the surname was equally disappointing - along with seven underlings who Kenny might or might not have seen before, all brandishing assault rifles.

As he was above a one of those vents, Kenny was in prime position to listen in to the conversation, which was conveniently reaching the meaty part of proceedings.

"…complete control. We can bring up the rest of our forces and move on within the week," explained one of the underlings, a blond guy who Kenny remembered making him U-turn out of the square earlier that day.

"Right," Greg nodded, turning to a local map. Kenny reached down, uncomfortably, to his phone. "Relay it to the force. When the reserves arrive we move on to Denver. It's a much bigger population centre and will take more time, but from then we can pick off outlying towns."

"And you're sure the people don't know about-"

"Absolutely." Greg was pinching the bridge of his nose in a way that reminded Kenny of Stan. He couldn't help wondering how Stan was doing over in Washington, at that. It also gave Kenny the impression that Greg had been asked that question too many times that day. "The jammers are all working, there's no phone, Internet, nothing. They'll keep thinking this is happening everywhere, and soon it will be. I mean, what's your problem?" Once again, Kenny recognised the tone - it was the way in which someone got annoyed at someone they didn't want to get angry at - like someone integral to a plan but who had to be told everything fifty thousand times before it began osmosing through their adamantium skull.

There were a few seconds of silence. Kenny moved his phone to the grille, fired up the camera and took a photo of the map, intending to study it later.

It was at this point that Kenny wished he'd checked he had his phone on silent first.

The electronic click that digital cameras had no need for but insisted upon anyway resounded through the vent much louder than it should have. Kenny caught Greg's eye briefly before he pointed at the section of vent he was in, then there was gunfire. Once again, as Kenny felt blood soaking into his clothes and saw it dripping through the vent, he cursed that shoddy workmanship that had earlier left him with fist embedded in the metal.

Then a bullet hit him in his face and he was met with a black haired smug looking face on the other side of two computers. Kenny vaguely recognised the game on the screen. "Starcraft? That's a new one."

"So's spying on the military," Damien smiled at him, as ever in that unsettling way of his. Kenny sat down opposite Damien and began playing. "Would you like a hint?" Damien asked after five minutes.

"I've already got an observer over your base, no hints needed." At which point, a spore crawler nested next to said observer and blew it out of the sky.

"I mean about these guys in your town."

"Aren't there rules against that sort of thing?" Kenny asked as he began forting up, but leaving a couple of hidden weak spots where Damien could eke in. He didn't want to win, after all - acid fountains weren't fun.

"Do I look like the kind of guy who keeps to rules?" Damien asked in response.

"You look like it. I know you're not that kind of guy, but you kind of look like it, yeah." Kenny's trousers promptly caught fire.

"Take that back."

"ALRIGHT ALRIGHT!" The fire went out. "God!"

"Anyway, if you're going to spy on them again, don't wear your parkas. They've seen that navy thing of yours, the orange one will be too obvious. Find something else. And drop that stupid thing you made out of your blanket."

Kenny stared for a second, accidentally-on-purpose at the worst possible time for his defence in the game. "That's it? Fashion advice?" Pause. "Oh, and that blanket's fucking useful."

Damien shrugged. "There are rules against this kind of thing." Kenny glared at him for a second. "Okay… If you kill any of these guys, there will be no stain upon your soul." There was a pause, during which Kenny saw power to a few of the more key of his photon cannons get cut off. "Probably."

Kenny treated the Antichrist to a disappointed glare.

"Alright, you win this one." The destruction of Kenny's nexus by the advancing Zerg swarm could not have had better timing. "Get yourself a new wardrobe for your silly little escapades, and then beat up a few of those soldiers. Frisk them down. And then you might see what I mean." He leaned back as the last of Kenny's buildings was destroyed. "For the sake of fuck, stop them from getting to Denver."

"You give a shit?"

"No. But you will." He glanced at the time on his screen. "So best of three or something?"

* * *

Kenny was lucky enough to be in the lounge when his father woke up. It was an amusing sight, someone who'd been drunk in perpetuity for several years waking up sober. Kenny could only imagine the immensity of the headache Stuart would be suffering.

There was an immense groan, and Stuart ground his palm against his head. Kenny ignored him. He was still in the armchair, but that had been moved back to its original position.

Stuart turned to Kenny through bleary eyes. There could only be one reason he was sober. "Urgh… Are we out of booze?"

"Yeah." Kenny didn't pay too much attention - he was busy running through his Terrance and Phillip collection again. The third time.

"How come?"

"None in town."

There was a pause as Stuart tried to stand up and promptly acquainted his face with the floor. "How come?" he asked with a mouth full of carpet.

"Walled off. There's this terrorist thing going on, human imagination's under threat. Al-Qaeda's fault or something, and the army's been locking down population centres."

Stuart stared at Kenny for a few seconds, apparently waiting for the punchline. Then he just shook his head and said "Bullshit."

Whatever Stuart was about to say, Kenny thought it worth listening to him. He'd served his time, after all. "Bullshit?" he asked.

"Come on, what's the real reason?"

"….that's it."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah." Stuart collapsed onto the sofa next to Kenny and sighed. "I've got pictures and everything." Kenny passed his phone over and Stuart flicked to the picture he'd taken the day before. "That's the local superior officer. Greg."

"He's not army." Kenny turned to face his father and saw a lot of conviction there. "Absolute bullshit he's army. I'd bet everything I own."

"….how can you be so sure?"

Stuart pointed at Greg's face. "Look at him, he's got a fucking beard!"

"So?"

"You're not allowed that shit in the army!" Stuart gave the phone back and sighed. "Jesus buttfucking Christ…" Kenny processed that information. Greg wasn't the only soldier he'd seen with facial hair.

"And another thing," Stuart added, breaking Kenny's little reverie, "How the hell do you expect the army to lock down every back end town in the damn country when we're fighting a war in the Middle East too?" He bashed the back of his head on the sofa cushion. "They'd be spread way too fucking thin." Hadn't they said something like that the night before?

After the travesty of the previous attempt, Kenny had intended to take a small break between then and his next little spying attempt. But now, after that new information, not to mention Damien's little tips, he was ready to cancel his break and get right back in there to find out exactly what the fuck was going on.


	7. Pyjamas

**I need to organise my week better. I swear to god, my schedule is start writing on Wednesday, continue on Saturday, mad rush on Sunday night to get it done. One day I'll have a schedule. One day...maybe in 2047. And I'm writing something else right now so it's going to be even madder. So yeah, I REALLY need a schedule. But in the meantime, happy birthday to me.**

**Thanks all for reading, if you still give enough of a fuck to continue reading. **

* * *

With Damien's fashion advice, with those two words nestled comfortably in inverted commas the approximate size of the star Betelgeuse, Kenny had begun rooting through his drawers to find anything that could function equally well.

He wasn't having much luck. There was black, of course, but that wouldn't work except in absolute darkness - otherwise there'd be a silhouette left over. Navy was the best. But he had no navy besides his parka and the trousers he'd been wearing when he'd been shot. Which just figured.

He could walk away, naturally. But there wasn't much doubt in his head now - letting these army people, if in fact they were army people if his father was to be believed, was wrong. He wasn't having second or third thoughts about it, like he'd had to suffer back at the riot. This was certainty. What they were doing was wrong, and Kenny did feel the compulsive moral need to stop them.

Which was annoying. He got the feeling he was going to be dying a lot more before this was over, which he wouldn't enjoy. _Fuck morality _he thought.

He reached the bottom of his drawer and hit… Well, he didn't hit gold. Not silver or bronze either. What he hit was the consolation prize given to the abject loser, the "spirit award" that Cartman had once cheated his way to in a Special Olympics. It was something that may once have been the sort of thing Kenny was looking for but several trips through a wash had gotten rid of a lot of the dye.

Except that wasn't the case, was it? Kenny had never worn it. He slept in his underwear, and occasionally his parka if things got too cold. He did not wear pyjamas. And he most certainly did not wear lilac ones. But here they were, a birthday present from some relative of his who obviously didn't care about him enough to visit. Or maybe a friend who thought it was funny.

In any case they were revolting. And they were really thin as well, they wouldn't be much good against the cold.

But…. They were the best he could do. Very quietly and through grit teeth, he growled "Damien, you better not be fucking with me here." There was no response like he got occasionally, just in the back of his mind in a voice like a lead weight tapping an armed naval mine whose wife had just filed divorce proceedings.

He pulled out the pyjamas and asked himself what he could do with them to make them a bit less poncey. He glanced at the blanket arrangement under his bed and the ski mask on his drawers.

It'd be a work in progress, sure, but it was a start. Not a great start. But a start. Kenny could get to work on it pretty much immediately.

The first problem, he found, was a relatively simple one. The clothes were too big. A couple of sizes too big. Okay, he was undernourished, that was given. And it wasn't as if he was trying on some of Cartman's clothes or anything extreme. It was just too loose.

Easy enough to remedy - Kenny had a belt somewhere. He fished it out, and inevitably ran into a further problem. The material was thin enough to slip under the belt without much difficulty and then they were free to fall down again. Kenny let out a minor growl.

He could try lining them to make a snugger fit - the right material could even be warm like his parkas.

Out came the sewing kit.

This time the result was more successful than the silly blanket cloak thing that Kenny had in a single moment of absolute stubbornness tied himself to. He'd told Damien it was useful and god damn it he was going to prove that point. It wasn't pride - it was Damien never letting him hear the end of it.

The result, using whatever sheets he could find, was a much more padded and warm set of what were, admittedly, still pyjamas.

And there was still the matter of the waistband, which Kenny had had to sacrifice an item of clothing for. Specifically, a pair of briefs. It had been too much trouble cutting off the shorter waistband so he'd just sewn them straight on.

Which in turn led to the problem that they were shining white and wouldn't go well with the generally "dark camouflage" feel he was aiming for. Kenny had decided that that was a problem that could be tackled later though - there was only so much shit he was going to deal with in one day, and he had more demonic advice to heed.

He pulled on the still ridiculous looking stuff and regarded himself in his mirror.

Once again, Kenny growled. It didn't really work. The ski mask didn't work with it either. It needed…

Well, it needed either more or less. Kenny couldn't decide. He could either backtrack some and look sensible or go the whole way and look like an absolute fucktard and hope that that might at least disorient people for long enough to get an upper hand. An awful plan, he knew, up there with attacking Russia in winter, but it was the best he had.

He threw the silly blanket on in addition. That sort of helped, but it still looked awful. A final growl, just so that this stupid dress choice knew exactly how he felt about wearing it. Then he headed out.

* * *

The first thing he noticed was that even with the ski mask on he missed having a hood up - it was cold out.

After a few minutes heading towards town, Kenny stopped, ran into a back alley and removed the blanket thing and forcibly pulled a section of it through the heavier neck segment. Crude, yes. But sufficient. Just about sufficient.

He headed out, now at least with a bit more head warmth. He pulled the hood down a bit and headed out.

As it was night he didn't pass anyone except a couple of military patrols that either didn't notice him or didn't acknowledge him. He climbed his fire escape and made his way onto the roofs of the town. He looked around for a few seconds then started running towards the town hall. That was where the camp was, that's where soldiers would be.

As he approached the camp, though, he started getting his doubts. What if Damien _was_ just fucking around with him and he was about to make a horrible mistake?

No. He'd found an awful new wardrobe and adapted it accordingly. He'd come sufficiently far to be in sight of the town hall. Now was not the time to start questioning motives. If it turned out to be a mistake, then he'd just commit suicide, have words with Damien and then put the whole damn thing behind him.

He was going through with this shit. He got to the edge of the building, crouched down and waited for a patrol to pass by. He didn't have to wait very long - after a few minutes three uniformed men came down the street.

Kenny waited. The three men passed him - Kenny started walking in step with them from his point four storeys up. Then, once he was sure nobody was around, he jumped.

The soldier he landed on clearly had no idea what hit him. There was a hideous crunch as the neck snapped, somewhat easily Kenny thought. There were two more to deal with, though, and Kenny didn't want them getting a shot off. As they raised weapons, Kenny grabbed one and yanked hard.

As the soldier, as a precaution against people stealing his precious firepower, had the weapon on a strap around his neck, he came with the gun, falling spectacularly into the snow. Kenny then span around, clumsily managed to kick the second rifle away from his face and then, once he had his balance back, kicked the man in the bollocks before he could try again.

Not wanting too much trouble, while the two men were recovering from the surprise, Kenny looked over their weapons quickly and flipped the safeties and - just for extra security - released the magazines and threw them away. He might have kept them in his pockets, but that was the thing about lilac fucking pyjamas - they just did not have pockets.

If Jimbo and his weapons fetish were to be believed, that would leave a single shot remaining in the weapon's chamber. Kenny dragged the one with the snapped neck down the nearest convenient alley and waited once again.

Of course the good little soldiers went looking for their comrade. Kenny smiled from behind the mask. He wrapped his cloak around the stupid pyjama suit and waited.

He was quite surprised when he saw one soldier look directly at him briefly then move on. He was…invisible. Or as good as.

Once they'd passed him, he jumped down. A swift kick to the back of one's knee sent him falling over. That, of course, alerted the other. Kenny was met with the butt of a rifle in his face. Of course, he fell over, bleeding from the nose. From the floor, he kicked out at the man's shins. Once again he fell.

Kenny crawled up so he was straddling the guy and pulled his handgun out of its holster. He started beating the man with the butt of his own gun.

The venting of his anger at having his nose broken had to be cut short when the sight of the second soldier getting up and pointing his rifle at him caught Kenny's eye. With no other option, Kenny fired the pistol into the other guy's face. He fell instantly.

The noise was going to gather attention, though. Kenny very seriously wished he'd brought some wire or rope with him. He'd have to improvise then - and, as luck would have it, the door he tried next to him was open. He dragged the guy he'd shot indoors and waited. He heard people outside.

Well, the door was solid, with no windows. Kenny turned on the lights and found he was in a restaurant kitchen. No alarms were going off, so that was a plus.

Frisk the guys down, Damien had said. Kenny pulled his hood down and his mask off, then began. Before he got far though, he couldn't help noticing the amount of blood coming from the head wound was a bit less voluminous than one would expect. Kenny knew better than most.

More to the point, one would not expect blood to be blue.

Kenny knelt there for a few seconds, then out of curiosity he tried removing the clothes of the dead soldier. Of course, after the blue blood thing he wasn't entirely surprised that the soldier's skin also came away to reveal a carapace of some sort.

Kenny's brow very seriously furrowed. He stripped the carapace down further to find that the arms ended in huge pincers. Finally, he pulled the face off… Well, he didn't get that far. At that point the door started being banged from the outside and in the sudden panic, Kenny's reflex action was to shoot himself in the face. And down to Hell he went.

Damien was waiting for him, as ever. When he got there, Damien stared at him. "An…interesting choice of outfit."

"It was the best I could do at short notice," Kenny muttered. "Entirely your fault, by the way. So what is it today?"

"DEFCON." Damien had computers out again. "I don't know why I didn't get into computers before now you know."

"What the hell was that?" Kenny demanded, changing his tone of voice and the subject with all the abruptness of the death of John Sedgwick.

"Didn't get enough time to look, Kenny boy?" Damien chuckled.

"It was a fucking crab in a human skinsuit."

"Bingo." The games were open on the computers now.

There was silence for a few seconds. "Crab people?" Kenny asked in a low, disbelieving voice.

"Uh huh."

"What, so-" Damien cut Kenny off as the game began.

"Kyle wasn't bullshitting. They weren't responsible for that whole Beaverton thing, though, that was your hippy friend."

"Stan isn't a hippy, dude," Kenny responded, defending his friend in the half hearted way he did. "I mean, sure, one day he's going to be one, no doubt, but right now all he does is play the guitar badly and eat veggie burgers occasionally."

Damien shrugged. "I cannibalise sometimes. He's a hippy by my standards."

"Woah!" Kenny looked over his screen to glare at Damien. "I know it's Hell and all, and I did have suspicions and all, but too much fucking info!"

"Point is, yeah, you're fighting crab people. If you're fighting them, that is. And if you aren't you should be."

Kenny paused for a second, leaning back from his keyboard as he ticked that over. Not military. Questionable motives, clearly lying to the town… "That makes…" Kenny paused for a few seconds to consider it some more. "That makes insanely good sense." Another pause, in which time the game hit DEFCON 3 - the point at which hostilities could commence. "Well, fuck."


	8. Skin Suits and Punctuation Marks

**Now that most of the cards have been thrown upon the table with enough force to sever several vital blood vessels in the neck it may be a nice easy ride from here on in. Or it may not. I'm making this up on the fly, even I don't know what's going to happen. Escalation, maybe. I once again thank you all for bearing with this for so long and remind you of where the review box is. Down there. So...enjoy, I guess.**

**I'm aware I'm not good at these ANs. Ask me why I bother. **

* * *

Kenny's parents' sobriety meant the house was unusually quiet. Which was very nice for him, because it gave him a lot of quiet time to mull over a very unattractive thought.

Crab people.

_Fucking crab people. _

Kenny was still processing that one and despite his assertion that it did, in fact, make sense, he was having a lot of trouble.

He was busy staring up at his ceiling while ticking it all over. On the bright side, it made a lot of things easier - as Damien had told him, killing these things would be significantly easier on him and there wouldn't be any heavy moral issues there either. On the other hand, how did one kill crab people?

Kenny knew someone who knew. He picked his phone up and was on the verge of texting Kyle, when he remembered partly through memory but mostly through his having no bars of reception that the army… No, the crab people, they were jamming everything.

God, he still thought of them as army. No, they were actually crab people. But Kenny just couldn't process that.

It was revolting. Partly the fact that presumably they had to kill six hundred odd people and flay the corpses in order to get the appropriate skin suits that they were now using, but mostly just because he found the idea that those…._things _existed. He couldn't even think the words without gagging up a minor natural disaster's worth of bile.

Kenny had to distract himself. He forced his way up so he was sitting on the edge of his bed, then stood up - painfully. There were several cracks and clicks as he made his way up, which could only mean that he'd been lying down a little longer than he'd thought. He checked his phone again - three hours, he'd spent.

Three hours trying to force his brain to be a little more open to the idea of anthropomorphic crustaceans and his brain refusing to comply.

Kenny decided some brain numbing television was in order. He fished out some of his old NASCAR videos and headed through to the lounge. He spent five further hours watching cars driving in circles before giving up completely.

He needed to be sure.

Back to his room. As ever, the clothes he'd been wearing had regenerated. Kenny had meant to add the hood he'd devised the night before in a more permanent fashion to his cape arrangement, and Kenny decided he was just going to call it a cape from now on because it always momentarily distracted him, thinking about exactly what it was. But he'd forgotten to do that.

Kenny pulled everything on and climbed out of the window. His first stop was barely ten metres away: the kitchen. All the food he'd stolen a few weeks prior was gone by now, so it was back to its normal state of being not very well stocked, but they still have a few decent knives in there. As Kenny had seen the window open on his way to his room, he was able to just reach in and grab one. Not a large one, of course; a sharp one.

He stowed it away in the back of his belt then started running towards town.

"Alright," Kenny said to himself, "all I have to do is get one, and make _absolutely sure _that…" There was something else. He stopped in his run and retreated under the bridge he had been crossing. He had been finding that talking in the ski mask was incredibly uncomfortable because the material was a bit too rough around the jaw.

He pulled the mask off and then got the knife out. Then, he hacked a large segment of material around the mouth off the garment. Then he tried it back on.

Now the mask covered down to Kenny's nose, then his jaw and the top of his neck were exposed. The other side of the hole was below where the cape was bunched up around his neck but was intact so as the mask didn't flap around too much if the air caught it.

Kenny threw the cut away section into the river, where it floated merrily away downstream to another shit hole. That is if it didn't get caught in the huge fucking wall that had been built around the town.

He resumed running.

Forward he went before once again running into a patrol. Two men. Or crabs. Or whatever. Kenny jumped into the next road he passed and pressed himself to the wall. Then as the patrol passed, he struck.

He managed to keep it quieter and quicker than the previous night. Kenny stabbed the first soldier through the neck, then slashed the other's throat within a few seconds. As soon as he saw the blood come out blue, he knew that the assessment that every soldier was actually a crab was right but he wanted to see what he was dealing with properly.

Kenny began slicing through the skin suit, which wasn't much less than a centimetre thick and not that strong against the knife. It took five minutes to fully remove it, and more than once he cut through the carapace of the creature inside, spilling more thin blue bile everywhere. But the finished product, so to speak, was quite a sight.

The crab had been compressed into the suit some. It would have better fit a bodybuilder's skin, and a taller than average one at that. But, Kenny saw, despite the size the carapace itself was pretty weak. Kenny could push down on it and cause it to crack with relative ease, and an experimental snapping of the neck was unexpectedly easy.

There was still an obvious problem, though - most of the time they would have guns and Kenny would be unarmed, and they'd proven they could use them even with pincers in place of fingers and opposable thumbs. And they were planning on moving on to Denver, Greg had said.

Kenny needed to stall them, and sooner would be better than later. How could he stall them though?

He cycled through a few ideas then took the least terrible one. The school was barely a mile out of his way, anyway. He threw the bodies of the crabs and the shredded skin suit into the first dumpster he passed and started running, unconsciously avoiding lit areas.

At the school he picked up a single piece of paper and wrote a short message on it in green chalk. As an afterthought, he drew a large, squat question mark on the other side of the sheet. Then he started running again. Somewhere he registered that he could run a lot further before getting too out of breath now.

He found his fire escape, onto the roofs. He ran to the city hall again, got as close as he could without having to leave the cover of the roof and waited. He needed to think. Specifically he needed to think about where he'd been in that building the night he'd had enough lead pumped into him to fuel all the batteries that NASCAR would need for the foreseeable future.

He'd started on the far side of the build from where he was now and headed inwards. He'd ended on the same floor, despite a detour through the upstairs bathrooms, so he concentrated on his left-right directions.

After five minutes of frustrated confusion, though, he saw a very recognisable goatee past an open window. How convenient. Kenny folded his note up into a paper aeroplane with the question mark on top and the message on the underside.

Kenny was quite the paper plane thrower, due to a very mischievous childhood. Paper planes were something he did when he wasn't busy getting into fights with the fatass or reading magazines whose primary content involved stonking great titties. So when he threw, even from across a road and a few metres of grass, the plane flew straight through the window and slid along the table it landed on.

Kenny watched Greg from beneath his cape, hiding the lighter purple clothes behind the ledge of the roof. He watched him unfold the note and regard the squat punctuation mark with some confusion, then flip the page and intake breath a little sharply as he saw the words, emblazoned in bright green, CRAB PEOPLE staring at him.

Greg glanced out of the window to see where the plane may have come from, but saw nothing. Kenny smiled and, as soon as Greg was distracted with his radio, fell back some. He had to stay around to watch what would happen, naturally.

Activity heightened, that was for sure. Quite a few patrols went out, more heavily armed than Kenny had seen previously. A few people with fancier rank patches that Kenny didn't have a hope in hell of correctly identifying hurried indoors. Clearly there was something about to happen that was worth listening in on.

The thing was Kenny wasn't up for dying again. He needed a way to listen in without risking getting shot at, and given the situation that was to be a tall order. The only thing in his favour was the increase in patrols - enough to warrant being called a search - meant there were fewer soldiers around the camp. There were more blind spots, but still not really enough. It'd have to do, though - Kenny made the drop, holding his cape out parachute style.

He stayed in the shadows. He edged along the wall, trying to keep still when he saw someone looking in his direction and always being a little wary of being caught. Eventually, though, he came to the road. Well lit and too wide. Kenny glanced around for a few seconds then, as soon as he thought it safe, bolted.

He dived into the bushes that lined the town hall building and waited. There was no alert or sound that indicated he'd been seen, and a glance around confirmed business as normal. Kenny smiled then started edging through the bush to Greg's window.

Whatever meeting was going to happen had yet to start so Kenny waited. It was tempting for him to pull his phone out and play games or something, but fifteen minutes in he hear Greg's voice. "Gentlemen," he started, and Kenny couldn't help a small, hushed laugh at how seriously they took the charade that they kept it up in private, "we have a minor issue."

There was a thud, followed by a few inquisitive sounds then a collective gasp a couple of seconds later. "Somebody knows?" asked some underling.

"Apparently so," Greg sighed. Kenny had to give the guy credit, he could keep his cool. "Options," he ordered.

"What is that emblem?" asked the underling.

"Just a question mark. Nothing I've seen before so I've elected to ignore it. What's more important is this." There was a pause and a scrape of wood on floor. Kenny guessed Greg had stood up. "What effect does this have on the schedule?" A pause.

A new voice spoke up. "The remainder of the army was due to make their way up to the surface tomorrow, we were due to move out the day after. Do we accelerate?"

Another pause. "No," Greg replied. "We wait." Then another gasp. "We can't continue with someone knowing this."

"Excuse me," came a particularly weedy sounding voice, "as far as we know this is just one person. What can one person do?" There was five seconds of silence, maybe.

Then Greg's voice came again. "This." BANG. Thump. Once again, Kenny found himself admiring Greg somewhat - that was perhaps the finest answer ever offered to that statement. "I hated that guy… Alright. We will hold this fort for longer. Our window of opportunity is short, if we haven't taken at least one major city before the imagination crisis is over this plan will fail."

That was good news. Kenny just had to stall them.

"But while we probably _could _afford to risk having someone running around knowing about us, I do not want to take that risk unless absolutely necessary. So we stay here, we find this person or people, we silence them, then we can move." Another pause. Kenny could see that whatever this plan of theirs was, he was their proverbial spanner in the works. And he was a tricky spanner to get rid of on a permanent basis.

"In the meantime, we keep the jammers working, we keep-"

The door opened violently, startling Kenny even from the other side of the room and out of the window. "Colonel?"

"Yes?"

The new voice sighed loudly, exasperatedly. "Two more."

The silence that followed could have been cut with a spoon. "Brilliant…" Greg groaned. "So this mysterious person is now not just taunting us with paper missiles, he is also picking us off. Step security up. Investigate suspicious activity. And for fuck's sake, stay safe. I don't want to lose any more soldiers." Kenny smiled briefly.

Out of sight, he made his way away from the town square and began wondering what his next move should be. He needed some information on the crab people and Kyle was the obvious person to go to, but those jammers Greg had mentioned twice now were in the way. Taking those down was a logical step. But Kenny saw one problem.

He had no idea where these jammers were, what they looked like, or how they worked. All of which he could do with knowing before he was able to break them.


	9. Getting Signal with Dynamite

**Was there an update last week? No. Do I have an excuse? Yes. My laptop did not work because of reasons. It has since been replaced and the offending device has been sacrificed to the great god Imhotep. Updates hopefully as normal now. Have some explosions as recompense if you're still paying attention. And if you are...thanks, guys.**

* * *

Kenny couldn't quite believe what he was about to do. Of all the people in all the world he could ever end up going to for advice, this one was very low on the least, only just above the cast of Jersey Shore and several miles below his own turds. And yet here he was.

He took a deep breath and walked into the lounge, sitting in the middle of the sofa and looked at Stuart in the armchair. "Hey, dad?"

"What is it?" he asked. Kenny always forgot how alright a person his father actually was.

"Uh… This is going to sound weird."

"Okay?" One of Stuart's eyebrows had ascended.

"When you were in the army, did you ever use some kind of signal jammer?"

Stuart thought about it for a minute, though Kenny suspected he was paying attention to the fight between two NASCAR drivers that was taking place on the TV at the time. It was a recorded VHS of course, so they both knew how it ended. But it was still a good fight to watch. "Yeah. That does sound weird. But yeah."

"Right," Kenny nodded. He paused for a second. "Do you remember what it looked like at all?"

"Getting weirder." Another pause for another car crash. "Well, it's just circuitry to me, I was just a grunt. The boots on the ground, they just told me how to work the damn thing. But it did have an antenna, if that helps."

Kenny nodded, then gave it a couple of minutes before prying some more. "How large was it?"

"Why the hell do you need to know this stuff, Kenny?"

Kenny thought quickly. "Writing project. For school. As we're off while this thing in Washington goes on, I wanted to do it good."

"Oh. Okay." As nice as he was, Stuart was still dumber than a small bag of wet mice when not drunk. "Well, depends how much area you want to black out. Pocket size thing would give, like, ten or twenty yards. You want to blank a village or town, you need a bigger antenna. Like, a radio tower or something. That or a lot of the damn things."

"Right," Kenny said, processing that new information. "Thanks, dad."

"No problem."

Kenny stayed long enough to watch a few more laps of the race on the TV then retired to his room. He had a few stops to make before he could start considering attempting to do anything about the jammers.

The first stop was, strangely enough, "Uncle" Jimbo's gun store. Kenny did feel a small pang of guilt about having to steal things again, but this time he could take some mitigating factors into account. Firstly, this was in aid of getting a group of invaders out of town, or at the very least stopping them from expanding to anywhere else.

More importantly, though, this was Uncle Jimbo he was stealing from, a man who very likely wouldn't notice and even if he did wouldn't be able to process the correct course of action to take. Jimbo was retarded so he wasn't going to be sad or anything about a few missing explosives that he'd doubtless illegally replace quickly and a possible smashed window, and Kenny would be a lot happier in possession of the ordinance.

It was a very Cartman-esque line of thinking, Kenny had to admit, but here and now he felt he might have to be slightly ruthless. The alternative was leaving Denver to the crabs and after that, Kenny didn't want to imagine. The thought was a bit unsettling. So, in his room, he stole a glance at a porn magazine he'd left open in his wardrobe. Distraction tits always worked.

He dressed up in the pyjama suit thing again. Then he paused again. He couldn't just carry explosives halfway across town in his hands, and he didn't have any pockets.

Kenny thought for a few seconds, then added a place to stop on his list of burglary targets and another pang of guilt to his already annoyed gut.

* * *

Kenny finished fixing his new acquisitions on the back of his belt. He'd taken three pouches, all in brown, and hooked them on the back of his belt. He'd chosen carefully - they were lightweight, sturdy and fairly large. Large enough to store a few small explosives, which were what Kenny was looking for now.

He knew Jimbo had a cache of explosives somewhere. It wouldn't be in the front of the store, not even Jimbo was that stupid. Instead, Kenny was rooting around the back rooms, trying to find anything that looked good. He'd found a few blocks of C4 that he was sure Jimbo shouldn't have had, but he didn't know how to use the damn stuff.

Ideally he'd have had something with a fuse. Sticks of dynamite or something similar. Kenny started checking the cupboards in the room. Assault rifles, shotguns and on one occasion a rocket propelled grenade launcher fell out, but no dynamite.

Then Kenny hit gold on the sixth cupboard he tried. Enough dynamite to run a small mining company for a decade or two - or a large one for a couple of years - fell out on top of him, knocking him over. Nobody ever expected anyone to pack that much dynamite in that tightly, but then most people didn't pack explosives so tightly in a cupboard.

Kenny looked around before taking a few of the ones with longer fuses and larger looking payloads. He knew nothing of explosives but bigger was probably better.

He deposited a reasonable amount in the two pouches that didn't contain his mobile phone and almost moved on. Then he paused - he still needed a light. So he picked up Jimbo's Zippo and left.

Antennas, Stuart had said. A transmitter of some sort. The two possibilities were lots of small ones, which would be more difficult for Kenny, or a few large ones. Or even a single large one. That would mean they'd either brought their own antenna tower or borrowed one conveniently already there.

The local radio station, then, seemed an obvious place to start looking. Kenny started moving - briskly. As ever he stayed in shadow, out of sight. He eventually had to take a shortcut across the open at an uncomfortably small distance from the town perimeter wall. Kenny ran over snow and frozen ground, through woods and over a creek towards South Park Local.

The building itself wasn't much more than a concrete box with a mixing board and a CD player in it, but the antenna was different. Four storeys high with a number of transmitters at the top, powerful enough to cover all of town plus a bit more.

Kenny saw two problems. Firstly, he did not foresee the amount of explosive he'd brought as being sufficient to topple the antenna, he'd have to be very careful with what he was going to burn. And secondly - rather more pressingly - there were a half dozen men guarding the area. Moreover, they were being efficient enough that there weren't any blind spots worth exploiting.

He needed a distraction. He pulled out one of the smaller sticks of explosive and lit the fuse. Kenny threw it as hard as he could away from himself, not wanting to blow a limb off. It went a good twenty five metres before exploding, creating enough noise to distract half of the guards. Apparently they were well rehearsed.

Still, it opened a blind spot - Kenny moved in. The first guard he passed, he sneaked up behind and elbow locked his neck. The guard responded by running back into a wall, crushing Kenny between it and himself. Kenny held on, though. His pain threshold was high after all the beatings.

The guard was getting weaker, though - it seemed crab people lungs weren't as good as human ones. That was good. On the downside, the commotion was attracting attention from the other two guards. Kenny had little choice. He pulled the handgun from the guard's holster and shot him through the face.

What attention Kenny hadn't attracted yet was attracted now. There were a series of cracks as assault rifles went off. Kenny dived into cover behind the corner, then shuffled along. He found an alcove by what must have been the fire exit, and retreated in. It was shaded enough so he crouched and pulled the cape around himself.

One eye never left the entryway. Neither did Kenny's aim.

After a few minutes of watching, the guards resumed patrolling, more briskly and alert than previously. Kenny needed an entry though. He'd have to expose himself soon.

He poked his head out and saw one soldier going for his radio. That was _not _on - Kenny immediately shot the guy. Huge viscous blobs of blue fluid fountained out, something that Kenny had still to get used to. It was one thing seeing it spill forth from a crab, but from a person, even a crab in a skinsuit, was still a little bit disturbing.

The third soldier came round, seeing Kenny straight away and aiming. Kenny did the responsible thing and shot first. That left three, all three of which would know exactly where he was now if the first inappropriately loud bang didn't give it away. If they had any sense they'd come from both sides. That left one exit for Kenny.

He retreated into the alcove and put his back against one wall. _If this works, someone owes me some money. _He put his hands against the opposite wall - which was uncomfortably cold - then hoisted his feet against it too, wedging himself. Then he started shuffling upwards - quickly. He could hear people coming.

Just as they rounded the corners, he rolled over onto the roof, next to one of the antenna tower struts. He heard an annoyed sound from underneath him. "Target lost?"

"Yes." There was a second of silence. "He can't have gone far. Spread out." That sounded good. Kenny moved to the middle of the roof and looked for a way in. As it was a one storey building, there wasn't a door onto the roof, but there was a small trapdoor that Kenny saw after a couple of seconds.

He added a couple more things to his list of things he'd need for this stupid costume he was building up for…crab fighting. And there was something he thought he'd never get to think about. Gloves were in order - thick ones. And some manner of light source. A torch would be too bright. Glowsticks, maybe?

Kenny slid into the building. It was small but pretty well furnished - CD racks, a sound board, a couple of microphones. All Kenny wanted, though, was a nice simple on/off switch. The thick cable running into the ceiling, then, seemed to be the closest he was going to get. He climbed up one of the racks, knocking age old CDs onto the floor. Then he grabbed the cable and yanked.

Nothing much happened. Kenny yanked again. Then again. On the seventeenth attempt, it finally came loose. Directing a few choice swear words at the cable, Kenny readied some dynamite. The other end of the cable had led to some equipment Kenny didn't have time to care about what it might have done, but it had a few lights on. And - lo and behold - an on/off switch. Meaning the seventeen yank disconnection Kenny had wasted energy and patience on had been unnecessary.

Still, a glance at his phone confirmed he had signal so it had worked. So Kenny decided now was the time to finish things off. He forced the cover off the equipment and put a few sticks of dynamite in there. He bunched the fuses together and left the remaining sticks around various important looking pieces of equipment, hoping they'd get caught up in the fireball. Then Kenny lit the bunched up fuses and jumped for the ceiling exit, clambering out as fast as possible.

He rolled over, pulled his cape free and covered his ears. There was one loud bang and then…nothing. Kenny opened his eyes, not realising that he'd closed them a bit tighter than was necessary. He waited, but apparently the follow up explosions had yet to go off. He poked his head back through the trapdoor - there were a few small fires going and a huge blackened segment on a wall. And there was a mess.

Then the explosions came. Kenny got his head out in time to avoid it being ripped off or turned into carbon, but it rendered him temporarily blind and deaf to all bar a puff of flame and a _whoosh _from the door. He had to lie on the roof for a few minutes while his blued out vision and the ringing in his ears died down. He could hear a faint receding _crunch crunch_ of snow underfoot. He guessed it was the surviving guards leaving.

A look over confirmed two guards were leaving. Kenny skirted around the edge of the building until he saw the third one waiting at the main entrance. Kenny smiled to himself and jumped onto the guy. There was a series of loud snaps and cracks as Kenny's feet made contact. The guard collapsed and didn't move further, but wanting to be sure Kenny threw a punch into the guy's face. As the crab's skull was left concave, Kenny presumed him dead.

With his little mission a success, Kenny started making his way home. He pulled his phone out and scrolled through his contacts until he got to Kyle, and dialled up as he travelled over open ground, following the creek along back towards town where it joined onto the river he'd almost drowned in once.

Three rings and he got an answer. "What?" Kyle asked, sounding a mix of tired, angry and exasperated. Evidently he'd been asleep.

"Hey, Kyle. How've you guys been over there?"

"Asleep. What do you want?"

"This will sound very strange so bear with me."

"_What?_" Kyle repeated.

"Crab people."

"…what?" The tone change was big. Anger turned to confusion, tiredness to fear and exasperation to a dim feeling of smugness that his insistence that crab people actually existed had now been confirmed.

"I need to know everything you know about them."


	10. A Bet

**More delays, though I didn't miss the whole damn week this time. See, I moved back to university where I now live in a house and it had no Internet until today. It would have had it, but the last tenants didn't cancel the line. When you move out always cancel your Internet because apparently it takes several working days to cancel it on their end because BT are absolute cocksucking mungscraping thundercunt twattycakes. Anyway, how are you?**

* * *

Kenny kept off the road. Having very recently blown up some things of the crab people's, he was keeping off the road to avoid patrols. It had the additional advantage that it was sufficiently quiet that he could make the important phone call.

"So let us recap," Kenny said into the phone, walking slowly to extend the time he had to talk. "They've tried to invade before?"

"Yes," Kyle replied. "They used skin suits, tried to weaken the entire human race by making all the guys metro. Weaker. Not willing to get their hands dirty, you remember."

"I did love that parka though."

"_Don't_." Kyle's voice was sufficiently harsh that Kenny avoided a reminisce. "And they did that because they're weak themselves."

"You're telling me, I punched a hole in one of their faces today." Kenny was approaching the residential area by now so didn't have a lot of time left. "Do they have any weaknesses that can be exploited?"

"Not that I know of. Except their being weak generally, but if they're posing as army then they'll have guns." Kenny avoided using the acidic comment that presented itself for immediate use. "So that might be an issue." There was silence for a few seconds. "You said you're delaying them, just… Keep doing that."

"What do you think I'm doing?" Kenny sighed and walked on for a few more seconds. "From what I've heard, they need everyone distracted by this fucking imagination thing so hurry the hell up over there, alright?"

There was a very prolonged sigh on Kyle's end. "Kenny, I hope you realise something here. I am being twisted every way on this end." When Kenny didn't respond, Kyle continued. "The military are all ready to nuke Imaginationland. Stan and Butters need me to stop them. Now you're telling me that I need to speed things up, and that means saying imaginary things aren't real."

"Well-" Kenny began, about to defend himself, but Kyle cut him off before the protest could be lodged.

"It also means I won't have to suck Cartman's balls," Kyle added in a surprisingly offhanded way.

Kenny had reached the back garden fences of the houses along his road by this point so he stopped and leaned against one. He had to think. Hard. He ground his palm against his head. This whole thing of taking on the crabs in the first place had started because he wanted to do what was right. Now he was stuck. He didn't want to inflict that on Kyle, but at the same time he couldn't allow crabs to overrun the country. It couldn't spread to another town.

"Kyle…" A long pause. "Do whatever you need to. Just get the crisis ended. Get everyone to stand down. And dude, don't suck Cartman's balls. All the fat will just suffocate you." That earned a chuckle from Kyle. "Just keep it in mind, alright?"

"Will do."

"Got to go, bye." That was abrupt, being as a ten man patrol had just come into view headed towards the radio station. Ten men with assault rifles with those little torches attached to them that could very easily spot the nine year old boy in a silly outfit from the distance they were at.

Kenny instantly vaulted the fence he was resting against and, of course, landed on his face, but safely out of sight. He peeked between the planks and waited for the patrol to pass before resting. They passed - he turned around and collapsed against the fence, rubbing his now pained nose.

At which point he made direct eye contact with Craig.

Craig's head cocked. If Kenny had ever seen a sarcastic expression, this was it. Craig took in what Kenny was wearing - the lilac pyjamas, the briefs on the outside, the ridiculous cape and hood arrangement and the mutilated balaclava all made Craig's one-piece zip up car themed sleep suit thing look fairly normal. One eyebrow climbed upwards.

"Um… Hey Craig?" Kenny tried.

"Oh. It's you." Interest immediately dissipated.

"You didn't recognise me?"

"Dressed like a complete fag? No. I did not recognise you." Craig returned attention to the guinea pig he had in front of him. Kenny, crushed, pulled down his hood and balaclava and stepped forward.

"What are you doing out so late, Craig?"

"Heard some bangs or something, it woke me up and spooked the hell out of Stripe. I'm getting him some air. Calms him down."

"Eh, sorry," Kenny apologised. Truth be told he did like Stripe, arguably more so than Craig. That was mainly because Craig never let Kenny play with him, and it was a lot easier for Kenny to want something that he didn't have that he was allowed to potentially have at some point in the future, than something he didn't have and wasn't allowed to have ever.

Craig glanced up. "Why aren't I surprised?" He picked Stripe up. "Bunch of explosions go off, should have known you'd be involved. Though the, uh, outfit was unexpected. Well done." Craig turned towards the door.

"You mind if I come in?" Kenny asked. Craig didn't answer, but his not closing the door when he went in was enough of an answer for Kenny. He followed.

Craig was busy pouring drinks of milk. "So you want to explain?"

"What needs explaining?" Kenny took one glass and started drinking as Craig treated him to a glare.

"The explosions, the gay costume, why you're in my back yard, anything."

Kenny decided to start from the top. "Right… Explosions. I might have blown up South Park Local." Craig stared, absently petting Stripe. "I do have my reasons. Here's the second thing, really. The costume is sort of an identity protection thing, I don't want the army coming after me when I-"

"You're disrupting the army?"

"Yeah. They're not precisely the army though, they're… They're crab people."

Craig's shoulders sagged. He looked down towards the floor and sighed. "Right. Of course they are." He was silent for a few seconds, sipping his milk. "Let me guess, they want to take over the world?"

"Something like that," Kenny nodded. "The costume was the best I could come up with on short notice, basically. I did have this dark parka but a, uh, friend warned me against using that so I had to improvise and-"

"Kenny," Craig interrupted, "you overestimate how many shits I give."

Kenny grinned. "Am I overestimating that by however many shits I think you give?"

"No." Craig downed what was left of his drink in unison with Kenny and kept the straightest face he could. "You actually owe me shits."

Kenny nodded for a second, then thought about what Craig had said a little too much. _Huh? _"Anyway, do you have any gloves or anything? Like, thick ones?"

"No. My dad does though. These huge brown safety things. Boots in the same colour too. Take them if you want. They're by the back door."

"Oh. Thanks, Craig." Kenny went off to pick up the new apparel, which turned out to be heavy duty gardening equipment. That was a shock for Kenny - he'd never thought of Craig's dad as the type who particularly cared about their garden. Or his mother for that matter. But there it was.

The boots were only a couple of sizes too big so Kenny decided to keep them, and the gloves were really warm on his hands. They were even fur lined, like his parka.

He moved back into the front room where Craig was still playing around with Stripe. Without even looking at him, Craig said "You still look gay, you know."

Kenny had to pause for a few seconds, so when he said "Function over fashion, asshole" in response it came out exceptionally weak sounding.

"And the function is..." Craig left it hanging.

"Keeping my identity secret, staying hidden in dark places."

"What, are you playing superhero?" Craig even had the audacity to smirk to himself over how silly that sounded. Kenny was a bit annoyed at that.

"I might be," he replied testily.

That elicited a small amused chuckle. "What? I've been working out and everything!" Too late did Kenny realise that that really didn't help his position any.

"Alright, hero," Craig said, focusing full attention on Kenny now and letting Stripe run up his arm to sit on his shoulder, "what's your name?"

Kenny paused to just make sure that he had definitely heard that right. "Kenny McCormick, have you forgotten?"

"You want to keep your identity secret, but you're using your real name?"

Pause. "…no!"

"So what's your hero name, genius?"

Even Kenny's patience, which was normally in enough supply to feed three moderate African countries for a month, had worn thin after the night's events and this extended exposure to Craig's cynical half. His mind worked exceptionally quick to come up with a word that would particularly hammer home the identity point.

As a result, his response started out strongly then quickly weakened like an inverse Incredible Hulk. "It's Mysteriiiii…" There was the base word, at least. Kenny held that last syllable for a little too long as he tried to come up with something - the triumphant shout had devolved into a weak _er_. "iiiooo…" Mysterio? No, Kevin Stoley had mentioned that one once while talking about Spiderman, it was taken. "…on." There was the weak and quiet finish.

Kenny knew how he must have looked. Craig had one eyebrow at ceiling level, and had his specialty _you total cock _face on, the one that people came from the other side of the world to see. "Mysterion," Craig repeated, mouthing the words like they were made of a mixture of cyanide and wank. "You call yourself that. You run around in a bed sheet and purple pyjamas. And you blow stuff up." He thought for a minute. "Kenny, while you call yourself that and dress up like a pretty little princess, you have got no right to be blowing shit up and being a badass."

Kenny glared at Craig. "I'm interpreting that as a challenge."

Craig nodded. "Okay. You prove that you can be a badass mother fucker in that outfit and with that name, you name your price. Fail, I name mine. And my price is you leave me the fuck alone until further notice.

Kenny considered. "Mine has two parts. Firstly, you know that stupid field trip we're getting dragged on in a few months? To that stupid old timey town?" Craig nodded. "If we have to partner up at all, you partner up with me. I am _not _going with fatass again." Another nod. "Secondly, I get two uninterrupted hours with Stripe."

Craig glared for a few seconds. "Half an hour," he counter-offered.

"Ninety minutes."

"One hour." That's what Kenny had been hoping for.

"Done." He spat into his gloved palm and held it out for the handshake with Craig's disgusted line of sight. He retracted the hand and grinned. "You might have to hold that in a few months, Tucker." The glare moved from the patch of spit to Kenny's face.

"I'll ask once, _Mysterion_," Craig said, deliberately using the ludicrous name that Kenny had picked for himself, something Kenny was beginning to regret. "Get the fuck out of my house before I dropkick you out."

"Don't sound like no question," Kenny snickered, his redneck accent slipping through oh-so-slightly.

"NOW."

So, with the threat of Craig's foot up his arse to motivate him, Kenny left. Even though he couldn't see any patrols, he kept out of sight until he got to his house. It was late, of course, but the explosions that Kenny had been responsible for had woken up the entire house.

He climbed in through his window and pulled his clothes off, being as quiet as he could so as not to disturb his parents. Being as they were sober he couldn't rely on a drunken haze to mask any noises he made, but on the other hand if they did catch him they might not go as over the top as they did while they were inebriated when punishing him.

Fortunately nobody heard him so Kenny could slip into bed without interruption. He closed the curtains for what good that did, being as they were very holey and ragged, and rolled over so he was face down in the pillow. It had been a very tiring night after all. Needless to say he was asleep within five minutes.


	11. Sniping

**This is mainly a connector chapter. Not exactly great. But as I'm close to wrapping this up since there's, like, two other things I want to write, I needed to set things up. Just a few more and we'll be done. Next chapter will be better, I promise. **

* * *

With the mobile phone access restored to the town, Kenny hoped that people might ring other people outside of town, that they might find out at the very least that other towns didn't seem to be being cordoned off. Suspicions might be raised, best case scenario an uprising might happen.

That was what he hoped. What he expected was for a few people to notice they could use their favourite mobile network again, go "Huh," and start browsing Busty Asian Beauties dot com, and for the remainder of the town to not notice anything.

He rather wanted to listen in on more crab meetings too, but once again security had been stepped up some. They weren't at random stop searches just yet, but patrols seemed to be very frequent and very large. Five men in one group was comparatively small.

Kenny thought it would be best to lie low for a few days, really, but he likely didn't have a few days. With Kyle (hopefully) speeding up proceedings in Washington, the crabs could end up taking the risk of moving on with someone knowing about their existence and if they moved on, Denver could be royally fucked.

Which left the option of stepping up the pressure, but how? Kenny could fight, but the problem of them having guns and him not having one reared its ugly head once more. Ambushes were out of the question.

A strike at the leader seemed a decent choice, but the crab Greg seemed to be a clever one. Kenny had never seen him outdoors without a very generous guard around him. It was difficult but maybe possible. A few attempts might be in order, but fortunately Kenny could take that one. Dying and coming back was never a problem. But then…time.

He might have had weeks, he might have had hours. Kenny didn't want to take risks there.

Which meant he had to move quickly. He stood up from the perch where he'd been crouching and looked around briefly.

As per his little bet with Craig, he had made a modification to the lilac shirt he was wearing. It was now emblazoned with a lime green M, just so the arsehole knew that Kenny was going to embrace that stupid name.

Kenny saw a small-ish patrol. Six men walking down the road, all armed. Kenny glanced around, looking for an effective ambush point, and picked a building two down from where he was. It was only two storeys high so he wouldn't break any bones on the fall, and there'd be a nice shadowy place to hide between the building's vent box and the wall next to it. He moved into position.

_Five. Four. Three. Two. One. _Kenny jumped as the patrol passed. He aimed each foot at a soldier, and heard two satisfying crunches as the new boots made the hidden carapace snap and buckle. He couldn't rescue his inevitable faceplant into the snow, but the shock the other soldiers suffered from made up for that. Kenny pounced on the nearest, ripping his rifle away and swinging the muzzle end at the legs of the next two, sending them falling. He had little choice but to fire at the final crab, who had recovered from the shock and was busy pointing his own rifle at Kenny.

Kenny then set to pummelling the remainder to incapacitation. Once he was satisfied and had wiped the pale blue fluid off the butt of the gun, he swapped the rifle for another one. It had an assault scope, which was the closest he'd get to a sniper scope here.

* * *

Kenny was looking at the square in front of the town hall through the scope. It was daylight now so significantly more risky than previous exploits. Plus he had been awake for nearly twenty four hours, and was drinking far too much energy drink to stay awake.

He was waiting for Greg. He'd come out eventually.

Kenny waited.

It was another hour before Greg came out to do the daily rounds, surrounded by a dozen guards as ever. Kenny took aim.

Had he ever looked into effective long range sniping, he'd have known there's a lot one has to learn. Timing the shot into his heartbeat, the effect of wind on the path of a bullet over range, the drop caused by gravity. Unfortunately his experience came from video games that had no concern for that stuff.

So when he fired at Greg's forehead, he instead hit his arm.

That wrecked the plan. Now that Kenny's position was effectively rumbled he had to either try again or abandon the plan. He looked through the scope again and saw Greg giving orders despite his bleeding blue, and half his guard pointing guns in various directions.

_Crap. _Kenny fell right back. He needed more advice.

Once he was safely hiding in an alley - in an all too familiar dumpster - he pulled his phone out and went into recent contacts. He highlighted Kyle and rang up.

He could hear the ringtone coming down the line - Maniac. Not a song Kenny had much appreciation for. After nine rings, the phone went to voice mail. _You've not reached Kyle Broflovski, this is his voicemail. Leave a message at the beep unless your name is Eric Cartman. In which case….fuck off. _Then the beep.

"Kyle, it's Kenny… Could you call me back?" Apparently Kyle was busy. Completely understandable. He tried another number.

There was silence for a few seconds. Then: _This call could not be connected. _That was Stan out of the question. Kenny briefly hovered over Cartman's number then moved on to Butters, but the same message came.

Well. He was on his own then.

* * *

If he couldn't reach anyone then things in Washington were hotting up. Time was running low. Not good.

Kenny needed to do something. Something incredibly stupid, if need be, but something at the very least. He wondered who else might be of assistance.

Then his phone rang. It was Kyle - Kenny picked up immediately. "Kyle?"

"I'm very busy, make it quick."

"The crabs. Last time, how'd you get them?"

"I didn't. A bunch of angry women came and hit them with various blunt objects."

There was a gap in speech then. Kenny leaned back - and as he was on a roof, that meant he was lying down. "Well," he said after a few seconds. "Brilliant." He hung up before Kyle could reply.

He had an idea but it was bloody stupid. As no other ideas presented themselves, though, he rolled with it. Firstly, he'd need paint. Spray paint. In green. As he wasn't in his stupid costume, though, that wasn't a problem - he climbed down the drainpipe and crossed the road to where there was an art and craft store.

Ten dollars poorer and with the can in hand, Kenny set off to find an appropriate place to do his thing.

The place he selected, after half an hour's walking around and an hour's observation, was the wall of a building. The second storey, to be precise. And patrols only passed every twenty minutes, so he'd waited for one to be out of sight. He started spraying.

The result was a two word message that was a couple of metres high. LEAVE NOW it said. Above that, with a lot of difficulty, Kenny had replicated that squat question mark.

That had taken fifteen minutes. He fled. Or rather, would have had he not tripped on the ledge of the building and smashed his face into the pavement.

When Kenny woke up, he was looking at a familiar computer.

"Hello again, Kenny," came that voice.

"Damien, now is not a good time."

"I know it's not. You'll only be gone a couple of hours, trust me."

Kenny winced. "I do hate it when you use that phrase."

Damien smiled at him. "And I hate it when you tell me things I know already." He fired up his newest game - Portal 2. Apparently they'd be doing the co-op levels. "So, it's all figured out?"

Kenny shook his head. "Absolutely not. But I'm going to try anyway."

"I know what you're thinking of doing. It's a stupid plan. Hell, I don't know if it's even a plan."

"Better ideas?"

Damien grinned again. "Rules, my boy, rules."

Kenny shook his head. "I don't give a fuck about the rules. That's my home up there. I'm not leaving it to the crabs."

"Alright," Damien sighed. A map appeared on Kenny's screen, in various shades of red. He recognised it as a plan of South Park, though not on any map program he'd ever seen. The town hall square highlighted. "Main camp's here." A road then highlighted. "Come from that road, it's the least guarded. Don't raise the alarm whatever you do."

Kenny grumbled a little then stood up. "As much as I appreciate your tactical advice, recall that I am the guy who fended off Hell's armies for Heaven."

Damien winced. "No need to swear, darling. And my father was so pissed off over that. You should have seen him." He chuckled to himself.

"Have you got any _other _ideas?" Kenny asked, irritably now.

Damien thought about it while they negotiated the opening chambers. "Okay. What you've been doing so far is planting a lot of fear and doubt in them. A large portion of that army is all ready to run for cover."

"But…?" Kenny also hated when Damien was deliberately evasive about things. It was like he was taunting him.

"But that one calling himself Greg with the stupid beard, he knows what he's doing. He is a dangerous one." Damien led the charge to the first set of puzzle chambers. "If you get him, your job will be much easier."

Kenny thought about that. "So… Kill the leader."

"Came pretty close already, didn't you? Except long range gunfire isn't as easy as it's made out to be."

"That it isn't," Kenny concurred. "But that was the best shot I'll get. Now he's just going to hide away more."

Damien paused for a brief spurt of thinking. "There's something else you can do."

"What?"

"Wait it out. I'm not supposed to tell you but the Imagination crisis is almost over. No more than a day after your regeneration, it'll all be over. The military will arrive, they can sort it out." He concentrated on the puzzle on his screen. "It doesn't have to be you."

Kenny fired back immediately. "Yes it does."

"Why?"

"Because I can. And if I die, no biggie." Damien was staring at Kenny, so he elaborated. "I'm the only person in town who knows exactly what is going on. I am capable…probably…of stopping it. Remember, if they think something's really up they're going to move on. That makes it worse." He paused to think. "So if I don't act, and something happens, then I won't be able to forgive myself."

"You have trouble with doing that," Damien commented. Kenny gave him a glare that could melt steel.

"Point is, after the last few weeks I've kind of realised something. I can really help people out. I can afford to be reckless like that. It started off with, like, just stopping the odd mugging here and there, because you know what the police there are like. But it's more than that. Now there's these fucking crabs everywhere, and I know you know what their plan is."

"But why you?" Damien reiterated.

Kenny shrugged. "I should. It'd be wrong not to, given I can." He paused. "What the hell is that look for?"

Damien was looking at him like he'd just spat on his dog, right after cutting its head off and urinating down the throat hole. "You and your morality. It never stops, does it?" Kenny went to say something but he was cut off. "I had to torture Immanuel Kant a few years back, because Dad gives me shifts in the pit sometimes. He just whined about it being against the categorical imperative, whatever that is. I ate his spleen."

Kenny stared for a second. Okay, he knew Damien was an occasional cannibal but that was just a little too much information. "….lovely."

A few hours of gameplay later, Kenny felt himself regenerating. He woke up in bed. He checked himself down - no abnormalities. It was dusk outside. So he went to his drawer and pulled out the costume, putting it on. He had no plan, he didn't expect whatever he was going to do to work.

But whatever would happen, he was ready.


End file.
